Lattice Strategies for the Dirty Multiple Access Channel

In Costa´s dirty-paper channel, Gaussian random binning is able to eliminate the effect of interference which is known at the transmitter, and thus achieve capacity. We examine a generalization of the dirty-paper problem to a multiple access channel (MAC) setup, where structured (lattice-based) binning seems to be necessary to achieve capacity. In the dirty-MAC, two additive interference signals are present, one known to each transmitter but none to the receiver. The achievable rates using Costa´s Gaussian binning vanish if both interference signals are strong. In contrast, it is shown that lattice-strategies (“lattice precoding”) can achieve positive rates, independent of the interference power. Furthermore, in some cases-which depend on the noise variance and power constraints-high-dimensional lattice strategies are in fact optimal. In particular, they are optimal in the limit of high SNR-where the capacity region of the dirty MAC with strong interference approaches that of a clean MAC whose power is governed by the minimum of the users´ powers rather than their sum. The rate gap at high SNR between lattice-strategies and optimum (rather than Gaussian) random binning is conjectured to be ¹/₂ log₂(πe/6) ≈ 0.254 bit. Thus, the doubly dirty MAC is another instance of a network setting, like the Körner-Marton problem, where (linear) structured coding is potentially better than random binning.