Capacity of a disjoint sum of channels

ID: capacity-of-a-disjoint-sum-of-channels

Combine finitely many discrete memoryless channels with disjoint input alphabets and disjoint output alphabets into a block-diagonal channel. The block label is determined by both input and output. If it has law , the mutual information is at most , attained by using each block's capacity-achieving conditional input law. Put and . The expression equals , so Gibbs inequality proves the displayed capacity, attained for block probabilities . Even blocks of capacity zero contribute distinguishable block choices; three disjoint zero-capacity blocks give capacity .

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