On the Necessity of Structured Codes for Communications over MAC with Feedback

Abstract: The problem of three-user multiple-access channel (MAC) with noiseless feedback is investigated. A new coding strategy is presented. The coding scheme builds upon the natural extension of the Cover-Leung (CL) scheme; and uses quasi-linear codes. A new single-letter achievable rate region is derived. The new achievable region strictly contains the CL region. This is shown through an example. In this example, the coding scheme achieves optimality in terms of transmission rates. It is shown that any optimality achieving scheme for this example must have a specific algebraic structure. Particularly, the codebooks must be closed under binary addition.