State Information

This paper considers a multiple-access channel with two state components, where the first sender knows only the first state component, the second sender knows only the second component, and the receiver knows both components. The notion of adaptive-rate capacity is introduced to characterize the set of achievable rates when the state is fixed in each transmission block but can vary between blocks. Single-letter characterizations of the adaptive-rate capacity region for the discrete-memoryless and the Gaussian models are established. The expected adaptive sumrate capacity is compared to the ergodic sum-rate capacities when the senders have complete and partial state information, and to the sum-rate capacity of the compound MAC. This comparison shows that the adaptive sum-rate capacity can be close to the ergodic capacity and much higher than the sum-rate capacity of the compound MAC.