Khojastepour, MohammadAazhang, BehnaamSabharwal, Ashutosh2007-10-312007-10-312003-04-202003-04-20M. Khojastepour, B. Aazhang and A. Sabharwal, "Bounds on Achievable Rates for General Multi-terminal Networks with Practical Constraints," 2003.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/20009Conference paperWe consider the problem of communication in a general multi-terminal network where each node of the network is a potential sender or receiver (or both) but it cannot do both functions together. The motivation for this assumption comes from the fact that current radios in sensor nodes operate in TDD mode when the transmitting and receiving frequencies are the same. We label such a radio as a <i>cheap</i> radio and the corresponding node of the network as a <i>cheap</i> node. We derive bounds on the achievable rates in a general multi-terminal network with finite number of states. The derived bounds coincide with the known cut-set bound of network information theory if the network has just one state. Also, the bounds trivially hold in the network with cheap nodes because such a network operates in a finite number of states when the number of nodes is finite. As an example, application of these bounds in the multi-hop network and the relay channel with cheap nodes is presented. In both of these cases, the bounds are tight enough to provide converses for the coding theorems, and thus their respective capacities are derived.engCapacityDiscrete memoryless channelAcheivable ratesConference paperCapacityDiscrete memoryless channelAcheivable rates