Short communicationAllocation of resources for the Gaussian multiple access channel with practical partial cooperation

A Gaussian multiple access channel, with partial cooperation between sources, is considered. We develop an encoding scheme in which the transmission is carried out over three orthogonal time phases. The first two phases are exploited such that the two sources can practically and partially exchange their messages. In particular, each phase is terminated when each user can generate the other user's codeword. Then, the two users can cooperatively transmit in the third phase. This formulation is used to (i) develop the achievable rate region, and (ii) numerically study the importance of each phase's length and the allocated power to each user in the three characterized transmission phases.