On the rates for the general broadcast channel with partially cooperating receivers

We consider the problem of communicating over the general discrete memoryless broadcast channel (BC) with partially cooperating receivers. In our setup, receivers are able to exchange messages over noiseless conference links of finite capacities, prior to decoding the messages sent from the transmitter. This problem comes up naturally in a sensor networking application, where a transmitter external to the sensor network wants to download data into the network, e.g., to configure the sensor array. In this paper, we extend the achievability results for the degraded broadcast channel derived in R. Dabora and S. Servetto (2004), to the general channel and present an upper bound on the rates