Attainable Error Exponents for the Poisson Broadcast Channel With Degraded Message Sets

Abstract

The Poisson broadcast channel with degraded message sets models a bandwidth unlimited optical broadcast network over which a sender communicates a common message to a pair of terminals and a private message to just one of them. The capacity region for this communication model is determined by the Ko/spl uml/rner-Marton result, which in the Poisson regime is shown to coincide with the capacity region of the degraded broadcast channel. We present explicit code construction and practical decoding rules which attain the corresponding capacity region, while attempting to maximize the attainable error exponents at the two distinct terminals. This is accomplished by computing the error exponents attainable by the suggested decoding rules, using the technique developed by Wyner and further extended by Bross and Shamai.