On codebook information for interference relay channels with out-of-band relaying

A standard assumption in network information theory is that all nodes are informed at all times of the operations carried out (e.g., of the codebooks used) by any other terminal in the network. In this paper, information theoretic limits are sought under the assumption that, instead, some nodes are not informed about the codebooks used by other terminals. Specifically, capacity results are derived for a relay channel in which the relay is oblivious to the codebook used by the source (oblivious relaying), and an interference relay channel with oblivious relaying and in which each destination is possibly unaware of the codebook used by the interfering source (interference-oblivious decoding). Extensions are also discussed for a related scenario with standard codebook-aware relaying but interference-oblivious decoding. The class of channels under study is limited to out-of-band ("or primitive") relaying: Relay-to-destinations links use orthogonal resources with respect to the transmission from the source encoders. Conclusions are obtained under a rigorous definition of oblivious processing that is related to the idea of randomized encoding. The framework and results discussed in this paper suggest that imperfect codebook information can be included as a source of uncertainty in network design along with, e.g., imperfect channel and topology information.