On Marton's Inner Bound and Its Optimality for Classes of Product Broadcast Channels

Marton's inner bound is the tightest known inner bound on the capacity region of the broadcast channel. It is not known, however, if this bound is tight in general. One approach to settle this key open problem in network information theory is to investigate the multiletter extension of Marton's bound, which is known to be tight in general. This approach has become feasible only recently through the development of a new method for bounding cardinalities of auxiliary random variables by Gohari and Anantharam. This paper undertakes this long overdue approach to establish several new results, including 1) establishing the optimality of Marton's bound for new classes of product broadcast channels, 2) showing that the best-known outer bound by Nair and El Gamal is not tight in general, and 3) finding sufficient conditions for a global maximizer of Marton's bound that imply that the 2-letter extension does not increase the achievable rate. Motivated by the new capacity results, we establish a new outer bound on the capacity region of product broadcast channels.