State-Dependent DMC with a Causal Helper

Abstract: A memoryless state sequence governing the behavior of a memoryless state-dependent channel is to be described causally to an encoder wishing to communicate over said channel. Given the maximal-allowed description rate, we seek the description that maximizes the Shannon capacity. It is shown that the maximum need not be achieved by a memoryless (symbol-by-symbol) description. Such descriptions are, however, optimal when the receiver is cognizant of the state sequence or when the description is allowed to depend on the message. For other cases, a block-Markov scheme with backward decoding is proposed.