Capacity of a Class of Modulo-Sum Relay Channels

This paper characterizes the capacity of a class of modular additive noise relay channels, in which the relay observes a corrupted version of the noise and has a separate channel to the destination. The capacity is shown to be strictly below the cut-set bound in general and achievable using a quantize-and-forward strategy at the relay. This result confirms a previous conjecture on the capacity of channels with rate-limited side information at the receiver for this particular class of modulo-sum channels. This paper also considers a more general setting in which the relay is capable of conveying noncausal rate-limited side information about the noise to both the transmitter and the receiver. The capacity is characterized for the case where the channel is binary symmetric with a crossover probability 1/2. In this case, the rates available for conveying side information to the transmitter and to the receiver can be traded with each other arbitrarily-the capacity is a function of the sum of the two rates.