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research article

Coded Downlink Massive Random Access and a Finite de Finetti Theorem

Song, Ryan  
•
Attiah, Kareem M.
•
Yu, Wei
2025
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

This paper considers a massive connectivity setting in which a base-station (BS) aims to communicate sources (X1, · · · ; Xk;) to a randomly activated subset of k users, among a large pool of n users, via a common message in the downlink. Although the identities of the k active users are assumed to be known at the BS, each active user only knows whether itself is active and does not know the identities of the other active users. A naive coding strategy is to transmit the sources alongside the identities of the users for which the source information is intended. This requires H(X1, · · · ; Xk;) + k log(n) bits, because the cost of specifying the identity of one out of n users is log(n) bits. For large n, this overhead can be significant. This paper shows that it is possible to develop coding techniques that eliminate the dependency of the overhead on n, if the source distribution follows certain symmetry. Specifically, if the source distribution is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) then the overhead can be reduced to at most O(log(k)) bits, and in case of uniform i.i.d. sources, the overhead can be further reduced to O(1) bits. For sources that follow a more general exchangeable distribution, the overhead is at most O(k) bits, and in case of finite-alphabet exchangeable sources, the overhead can be further reduced to O(log(k)) bits. The downlink massive random access problem is closely connected to the study of finite exchangeable sequences. The proposed coding strategy allows bounds on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between finite exchangeable distributions and i.i.d. mixture distributions to be developed and gives a new KL divergence version of the finite de Finetti theorem, which is scaling optimal.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/TIT.2025.3564114
Scopus ID

2-s2.0-105003698393

Author(s)
Song, Ryan  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Attiah, Kareem M.

University of Toronto

Yu, Wei

University of Toronto

Date Issued

2025

Published in
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Volume

71

Issue

9

Start page

6932

End page

6949

Subjects

exchangeable distribution

•

finite de Finetti theorem

•

Massive random access

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LTHI  
FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada

Available on Infoscience
February 10, 2026
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/259357
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