A Multi-Step Conference for Cooperative Broadcast

In this paper we consider the general broadcast channel with partially cooperating receivers having noiseless conference links of finite capacity between them. We present an explicit three-step conference scheme, which improves on the two-step scheme presented previously in [Dabora et al., ISIT 05]. The scheme achieves the full cooperation rate bounds at conference capacities that are less than the full cooperation capacities, i.e. C₂₁ < H(Y₂|Y ₁) and C₁₂ < H(Y₁|Y₂). We also introduce a new relaying strategy for the general relay channel, which results in a rate increase for any non-degraded channel and does not require auxiliary random variables