Beyond Identification: Computing Boolean Functions via Channels

Consider a point-to-point communication system in which the transmitter holds a binary message of length $m$ and transmits a corresponding codeword of length $n$. The receiver’s goal is to recover a Boolean function of that message, where the function is unknown to the transmitter, but chosen from a known class $F$. We are interested in the asymptotic relationship of $m$ and $n$: given $n$, how large can $m$ be (asymptotically), such that the value of the Boolean function can be recovered reliably? This problem generalizes the identification-via-channels framework introduced by Ahlswede and Dueck. We formulate the notion of computation capacity, and derive achievability and converse results for selected classes of functions $F$, characterized by the Hamming weight of functions. Our obtained results are tight in the sense of the scaling behavior for all cases of $F$ considered in the paper.