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arXiv:1102.2624 · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Classical Communication Over a Quantum Interference Channel

Omar Fawzi, Patrick M. Hayden, Ivan Savov, Pranab Sen, Mark M. Wilde

Published Feb 22, 2012• 36 citations
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Abstract

Calculating the capacity of interference channels is a notorious open problem in classical information theory. Such channels have two senders and two receivers, and each sender would like to communicate with a partner receiver. The capacity of such channels is known exactly in the settings of “very strong” and “strong” interference, while the Han-Kobayashi coding strategy gives the best known achievable rate region in the general case. Here, we introduce and study the quantum interference channel, a natural generalization of the interference channel to the setting of quantum information theory. We restrict ourselves for the most part to channels with two classical inputs and two quantum outputs in order to simplify the presentation of our results (though generalizations of our results to channels with quantum inputs are straightforward). We are able to determine the exact classical capacity of this channel in the settings of “very strong” and “strong” interference, by exploiting Winter's successive decoding strategy and a novel two-sender quantum simultaneous decoder, respectively. We provide a proof that a Han-Kobayashi strategy is achievable with Holevo information rates, up to a conjecture regarding the existence of a three-sender quantum simultaneous decoder. This conjecture holds for a special class of quantum multiple-access channels with average output states that commute, and we discuss some other variations of the conjecture that hold. Finally, we detail a connection between the quantum interference channel and prior work on the capacity of bipartite unitary gates.

DOI
10.1109/tit.2012.2188620

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Calculating the capacity of interference channels is a notorious open problem in classical information theory. Such channels have two senders and two receivers, and each sender would like to communicate with a partner receiver. The capacity of such channels is known exactly in the settings of “very strong” and “strong” interference, while the Han-Kobayashi coding strategy gives the best known achievable rate region in the general case. Here, we introduce and study the quantum interference channel, a natural generalization of the interference channel to the setting of quantum information theory. We restrict ourselves for the most part to channels with two classical inputs and two quantum outputs in order to simplify the presentation of our results (though generalizations of our results to channels with quantum inputs are straightforward). We are able to determine the exact classical capacity of this channel in the settings of “very strong” and “strong” interference, by exploiting Winter's successive decoding strategy and a novel two-sender quantum simultaneous decoder, respectively. We provide a proof that a Han-Kobayashi strategy is achievable with Holevo information rates, up to a conjecture regarding the existence of a three-sender quantum simultaneous decoder. This conjecture holds for a special class of quantum multiple-access channels with average output states that commute, and we discuss some other variations of the conjecture that hold. Finally, we detail a connection between the quantum interference channel and prior work on the capacity of bipartite unitary gates.
Calculating the capacity of interference channels is a notorious open problem in classical information theory. Such channels have two senders and two receivers, and each sender would like to communicate with a partner receiver. The capacity of such channels is known exactly in the settings of "very strong" and "strong" interference, while the Han-Kobayashi coding strategy gives the best known achievable rate region in the general case. Here, we introduce and study the quantum interference channel, a natural generalization of the interference channel to the setting of quantum information theory. We restrict ourselves for the most part to channels with two classical inputs and two quantum outputs in order to simplify the presentation of our results (though generalizations of our results to channels with quantum inputs are straightforward). We are able to determine the exact classical capacity of this channel in the settings of "very strong" and "strong" interference, by exploiting Winter's successive decoding strategy and a novel two-sender quantum simultaneous decoder, respectively. We provide a proof that a Han-Kobayashi strategy is achievable with Holevo information rates, up to a conjecture regarding the existence of a three-sender quantum simultaneous decoder. This conjecture holds for a special class of quantum multiple-access channels with average output states that commute, and we discuss some other variations of the conjecture that hold. Finally, we detail a connection between the quantum interference channel and prior work on the capacity of bipartite unitary gates. © 2012 IEEE.
The discrete memoryless interference channel is modelled as a conditional probability distribution with two outputs depending on two inputs and has widespread applications in practical communication scenarios. In this paper, we introduce and study the quantum interference channel, a generalization of a two-input, two-output memoryless channel to the setting of quantum Shannon theory. We discuss three different coding strategies and obtain corresponding achievable rate regions for quantum interference channels. We calculate the capacity regions in the special cases of "very strong" and "strong" interference. The achievability proof in the case of "strong" interference exploits a novel quantum simultaneous decoder for two-sender quantum multiple access channels. We formulate a conjecture regarding the existence of a quantum simultaneous decoder in the three-sender case and use it to state the rates achievable by a quantum Han-Kobayashi strategy.
We construct an encoding and decoding scheme achieving the Chong-Motani-Garg inner bound [1] for a two sender two receiver interference channel with classical input and quantum output. This automatically gives a similar inner bound for sending classical information through an interference channel with quantum inputs and outputs without entanglement assistance. Our result matches the best known inner bound for the interference channel in the classical setting. Achieving the Chong-Motani-Garg inner bound, which is known to be equivalent to the Han-Kobayashi inner bound [3], answers an open question raised recently by Fawzi et al. [4]. Our encoding strategy is the standard random encoding strategy. Our decoding strategy is a sequential strategy where a receiver loops through all candidate messages trying to project the received state onto a `typical' subspace for the candidate message under consideration, stopping if the projection succeeds for a message, which is then declared as the guess of the receiver for the sent message. On the way to our main result, we show that random encoding and sequential decoding strategies suffice to achieve rates up to the mutual information for a single sender single receiver channel, and the standard inner bound for a two sender single receiver multiple access channel, for channels with classical input and quantum output. Besides conceptual simplicity, a sequential decoding strategy is space efficient, and may have additional efficiency advantages in some settings. We prove our inner bounds using two new technical tools - a non-commutative union bound to analyse the decoding error probability, and a geometric notion of approximate interesection of two conditionally typical subspaces.
In this paper, we study the power of sequential decoding strategies for several channels with classical input and quantum output. In our sequential decoding strategies, the receiver loops through all candidate messages trying to project the received state onto a `typical' subspace for the candidate message under consideration, stopping if the projection succeeds for a message, which is then declared as the guess of the receiver for the sent message. We show that even such a conceptually simple strategy can be used to achieve rates up to the mutual information for a single sender single receiver channel called cq-channel henceforth, as well as the standard inner bound for a two sender single receiver multiple access channel, called ccq-MAC in this paper. Our decoding scheme for the ccq-MAC uses a new kind of conditionally typical projector which is constructed using a geometric result about how two subspaces interact structurally. As the main application of our methods, we construct an encoding and decoding scheme achieving the Chong-Motani-Garg inner bound for a two sender two receiver interference channel with classical input and quantum output, called ccqq-IC henceforth. This matches the best known inner bound for the interference channel in the classical setting. Achieving the Chong-Motani-Garg inner bound, which is known to be equivalent to the Han-Kobayashi inner bound, answers an open question raised recently by Fawzi et al. (arxiv:1102.2624). Our encoding scheme is the same as that of Chong-Motani-Garg, and our decoding scheme is sequential.
Polar codes are the first capacity achieving and efficiently implementable codes for classical communication. Recently they have also been generalized to communication over classical-quantum and quantum channels. In this work we present our recent results for polar coding in quantum information theory, including applications to classical-quantum multiple access channels, interference channels and compound communication settings, including the first proof of channel coding achieving the Han-Kobayashi rate region of the interference channel without the need of a simultaneous decoder. Moreover we add to the existing framework by extending polar codes to achieve the asymmetric capacity and improving the block error probability for classical-quantum channels. In addition we use polar codes to prove a new achievable rate region for the classical-quantum broadcast channel. We also discuss polar codes for quantum communication over quantum channels and state results towards codes for compound quantum channels in this setting. We conclude by stating a list of interesting open questions to invite further research on the topic.
We consider quantum channels with one sender and two receivers, used in several different ways for the simultaneous transmission of independent messages. We begin by extending the technique of superposition coding to quantum channels with a classical input to give a general achievable region. We also give outer bounds to the capacity regions for various special cases from the classical literature and prove that superposition coding is optimal for a class of channels. We then consider extensions of superposition coding for channels with a quantum input, where some of the messages transmitted are quantum instead of classical, in the sense that the parties establish bipartite or tripartite GHZ entanglement. We conclude by using state merging to give achievable rates for establishing bipartite entanglement between different pair of parties with the assistance of free classical communication.