Function Computation Over Multiple Access Channels via Hierarchical Constellations

Abstract: We study function computation over a Gaussian multiple-access channel (MAC), where multiple transmitters aim at computing a function of their values at a common receiver. To this end, we propose a novel coded-modulation framework for over-the-air computation (OAC) based on hierarchical constellation design, which supports reliable computation of multiple function outputs using a single channel use. Moreover, we characterize the achievable computation rate and show that the proposed hierarchical constellations can compute R output functions with decoding error probability epsilon while the gap to the optimal computation rate scales as O(\log_2(1/ε)/K) for independent source symbols, where K denotes the number of transmitters. Consequently, this gap vanishes as the network size grows, and the optimal rate is asymptotically attained. Furthermore, we introduce a shielding mechanism based on variable-length block coding that mitigates noise-induced error propagation across constellation levels while preserving the superposition structure of the MAC. We show that the shielding technique improves reliability, yielding a gap that scales optimally as O(\log_2\ln{(1/ε)}), regardless of the source distribution. Together, these results identify the regimes in which uncoded or lightly coded OAC is information-theoretically optimal, providing a unified framework for low-latency, channel-agnostic function computation.