On the Achievable Rate Region of the K-Receiver Broadcast Channels via Exhaustive Message Splitting

This paper focuses on K-receiver discrete-time memoryless broadcast channels (DM-BCs) with private messages, where the transmitter wishes to convey K private messages to K receivers. A general inner bound on the capacity region is proposed based on an exhaustive message splitting and a K-level modified Marton’s coding. The key idea is to split every message into [Formula: see text] submessages each corresponding to a set of users who are assigned to recover them, and then send these submessages via codewords chosen from a K-level structure codebooks. To guarantee the joint typicality among all transmitted codewords, a sufficient condition on the subcodebooks’ sizes is derived through a newly establishing hierarchical covering lemma, which extends the 2-level multivariate covering lemma to the K-level case with more intricate dependences. As the number of auxiliary random variables and rate conditions both increase exponentially with K, the standard Fourier–Motzkin elimination procedure becomes infeasible when K is large. To tackle this problem, we obtain a closed form of achievable rate region with a special observation of disjoint unions of sets that constitute the power set of [Formula: see text]. The proposed achievable rate region allows arbitrary input probability mass functions and improves over previously known achievable (closed form) rate regions for K-receiver ([Formula: see text]) BCs.