Capacity of a Class of Multicast Tree Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we characterize the capacity of a new class of single-source multicast discrete memoryless relay networks having a tree topology in which the root node is the source and each parent node in the graph has at most one noisy child node and any number of noiseless child nodes. This class of multicast tree networks includes the class of diamond networks studied by Kang and Ulukus as a special case, where they showed that the capacity can be strictly lower than the cut-set bound. For achievablity, a novel coding scheme is constructed where each noisy relay employs a combination of decode-and-forward (DF) and compress-and-forward (CF) and each noiseless relay performs a random binning such that codebook constructions and relay operations are independent for each node and do not depend on the network topology. For converse, a new technique of iteratively manipulating inequalities exploiting the tree topology is used.