Action Dependent Strictly Causal State Communication

Abstract: The problem of communication and state estimation is considered in the context of channels with actiondependent states. Given the message to be communicated, the transmitter chooses an action sequence that affects the formation of the channel states, and then creates the channel input sequence based on the state sequence. The decoder estimates the channel to some distortion as well as decodes the message. The capacity-distortion tradeoff of such a channel is characterized for the case when the state information is available strictly causally at the channel encoder. The problem setting extends the action dependent framework of [1] and as a special case recovers the results of few previously considered joint communication and estimation scenarios in [2], [3], [4]. The scenario when the action is also allowed to depend on the past observed states (adaptive action) is also considered. It is shown that such adaptive action yields an improved capacity-distortion function.