English

Some results on communicating the sum of sources over a network

Information Theory 2008-11-04 v1 math.IT

Abstract

We consider the problem of communicating the sum of mm sources to nn terminals in a directed acyclic network. Recently, it was shown that for a network of unit capacity links with either m=2m=2 or n=2n=2, the sum of the sources can be communicated to the terminals if and only if every source-terminal pair is connected in the network. We show in this paper that for any finite set of primes, there exists a network where the sum of the sources can be communicated to the terminals only over finite fields of characteristic belonging to that set. As a corollary, this gives networks where the sum can not be communicated over any finite field even though every source is connected to every terminal.

Cite

@article{arxiv.0811.0285,
  title  = {Some results on communicating the sum of sources over a network},
  author = {Brijesh Kumar Rai and Bikash Kumar Dey and Abhay Karandikar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0811.0285},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:37:37.925Z