Non-signaling Assisted Capacity of a Classical Channel with Causal CSIT

The non-signaling (NS) assisted capacity of a classical discrete memoryless channel with causal channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is shown to be $C^{NS,ca}=\max_{P_{X|S}}I(X;Y\mid S)$, where $X, Y, S$ correspond to the input, output and state of the channel.

Remarkably, this is the same as the capacity of the channel in the NS-assisted non-causal CSIT setting, $C^{NS,nc}=\max_{P_{X|S}}I(X;Y\mid S)$, which was previously established, and also matches the (either classical or with NS assistance) capacity of the channel where the state is available not only (either causally or non-causally) to the transmitter but also to the receiver.

While the capacity remains unchanged, the optimal probability of error for fixed message size and blocklength, in the NS-assisted causal CSIT setting can be further improved if channel state is made available to the receiver.

This is in contrast to corresponding NS-assisted non-causal CSIT setting where it was previously noted that the optimal probability of error cannot be further improved by providing the state to the receiver.

As a separate result we prove that non-signaling assistance, feedback, and strictly causal CSIT (i.e., transmitter knows only past channel states but not the current or future states), each of which is individually already known to not increase capacity, also cannot increase capacity when they are collectively made available to the transmitter.