Can Negligible Cooperation Increase Network Reliability?

Abstract: In network cooperation strategies, nodes work together with the aim of increasing transmission rates or reliability. This paper demonstrates that enabling cooperation between the transmitters of a two-user multiple access channel, via a cooperation facilitator that has access to both messages, always results in a network whose maximal- and average-error sum-capacities are the same---even when those capacities differ in the absence of cooperation and the information shared with the encoders is negligible. From this result, it follows that if a multiple access channel with no transmitter cooperation has different maximal- and average-error sum-capacities, then the maximal-error sum-capacity of the network consisting of this channel and a cooperation facilitator is not continuous with respect to the output edge capacities of the facilitator. This shows that there exist networks where sharing even a negligible number of bits per channel use with the encoders yields a non-negligible benefit.