Capacity Bounds for Broadcast Channels with Bidirectional Conferencing Decoders

The two-user broadcast channel (BC) with receivers connected by bidirectional cooperation links of finite capacities, known as conferencing decoders, is considered. A novel capacity region outer bound is established based on multiple applications of the Csisz\'{a}r-K\"{o}rner identity. Achievable rate regions are derived by using Marton's coding as the transmission scheme, together with different combinations of decode-and-forward and quantize-bin-and-forward strategies at the receivers. It is shown that the outer bound coincides with the achievable rate region for a new class of semi-deterministic BCs with degraded message sets; for this class of channels, one-round cooperation is sufficient to achieve the capacity. Capacity result is also derived for a class of more capable semi-deterministic BCs with both common and private messages and one-sided conferencing. For the Gaussian BC with conferencing decoders, if the noises at the decoders are perfectly correlated (i.e., correlation is either 1 or -1), the new outer bound yields exact capacity region for two cases: i) BC with degraded message sets; ii) BC with one-sided conferencing from the weaker receiver to the stronger receiver. When the noises have arbitrary correlation, the outer bound is shown to be within half a bit from the capacity region for these same two cases. Finally, for the general Gaussian BC, a one-sided cooperation scheme based on decode-and-forward from the stronger receiver to the weaker receiver is shown to achieve the capacity region to within $\frac{1}{2}\log (\frac{2}{1-|\lambda|})$ bits, where $\lambda$ is the noise correlation. An interesting implication of these results is that for a Gaussian BC with perfectly negatively correlated noises and conferencing decoders with finite cooperation link capacities, it is possible to achieve a strictly positive rate using only an infinitesimal amount of transmit power.