Communication via decentralized processing

The common problem of a nomadic terminal sending information to a remote destination via agents with lossless connections is investigated. Such a setting suits, e.g. access points of a wireless network, where each access point is equipped with a different connection bandwidth. The case where these agents do not have any decoding ability is fully characterized for the Gaussian channel, when the transmitter uses "typical" codewords. For general discrete memoryless channels, lower and upper bounds are derived. An achievable rate with unrestricted agents, which are capable of decoding, is also given and then demonstrated by a numerical example for the Gaussian channel