The Capacity of 3 User Linear Computation Broadcast

Abstract: The $K$ User Linear Computation Broadcast (LCBC) problem is comprised of $d$ dimensional data (from $\mathbb{F}_q$), that is fully available to a central server, and $K$ users, who require various linear computations of the data, and have prior knowledge of various linear functions of the data as side-information. The optimal broadcast cost is the minimum number of $q$-ary symbols to be broadcast by the server per computation instance, for every user to retrieve its desired computation. The reciprocal of the optimal broadcast cost is called the capacity. The main contribution of this paper is the exact capacity characterization for the $K=3$ user LCBC for all cases, i.e., for arbitrary finite fields $\mathbb{F}_q$, arbitrary data dimension $d$, and arbitrary linear side-informations and demands at each user. A remarkable aspect of the converse is that unlike the $2$ user LCBC whose capacity was determined previously, the entropic formulation (where the entropies of demands and side-informations are specified, but not their functional forms) is insufficient to obtain a tight converse for the $3$ user LCBC. Instead, the converse exploits functional submodularity. Notable aspects of achievability include a decomposition of the users' collective signal space into subspaces that allow different degrees of efficiency in broadcast cost, revealing a tradeoff that leads to a constrained water-filling solution. Random coding arguments are invoked to resolve compatibility issues that arise as each user has a different view of these subspaces, conditioned on its own side-information.