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It is well known that the capacity region of an average transmit power constrained Gaussian Broadcast Channel (GBC) with independent noise realizations at the receivers is enlarged by the presence of causal noiseless feedback. When the noise variances at the receivers are identical, even passive feedback via independent memoryless Gaussian links can lead to a capacity region enlargement. The last fact remains true even when the feedback noise variance is very high, and available only from one of the receivers. While such capacity enlargements are feasible for several other feedback models in the Gaussian BC setting, it is also known that feedback does not change the capacity region for physically degraded broadcast channels. In this paper, we consider a two user GBC with independent noise realizations at the receivers, where the feedback links from the receivers are corrupted by independent additive Gaussian noise processes. We investigate the set of four noise variances, two forward and two feedback, for which no capacity enlargement is possible. A sharp characterization of this region is derived, i.e., any quadruple outside the presented region will lead to a capacity enlargement, whereas quadruples inside will leave the capacity region unchanged. Our results lead to the conclusion that when the forward noise variances are different, too noisy a feedback from one of the receivers alone is not always beneficial for enlarging the capacity region, be it from the stronger user or the weaker one, in sharp contrast to the case of equal forward noise variances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In wireless communications, a fading multiple-access channel (MAC) is typically used to model the uplink communication. Conventional MACs assume a centralized system, where the transmission rate and power are chosen centrally for every fading vector realization. On the other hand, there is considerable interest in the performance of distributed multiple access systems, where the lack of global channel state information (CSI) demands novel communication strategies. We consider a block-fading MAC where each transmitter is aware only of its own link CSI, which we term as the individual CSI MAC. The receiver has access to the full CSI of all links. This model was recently introduced in the information theory literature, and naturally leads to a distributed access system with several applications. An important utility of interest for this model is known as the power-controlled adaptive sum-capacity, whose evaluation is an open problem. This is the main subject of the current paper. We present the power-controlled adaptive sum-capacity of a wide class of popular fading MAC models. In particular, we characterize the sum-capacity when the statistics of the channel are identical across users. The proposed schemes also allow a low-complexity successive-cancellation decoding using rate-splitting. Furthermore, the optimal schemes are extended to situations in which each transmitter has additional finite-rate partial CSI on the link quality of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]