In this paper we study the cooperative multiple access channel (MAC) with oblivious encoders and characterize its capacity region. Cooperation means that one encoder sends a message to the other encoder via a rate-limited link prior to transmission, while partial cribbing means that one encoder obtains a deterministic function of the other encoder's output. Partial cribbing can be done strictly-causally, causally, and non-causally. Prior work in this field dealt with the case where the two encoders are aware of each other's chosen codebook. In this paper we consider the case of oblivious encoding, where each user in a network is unaware of the codebook chosen by other users. Since an oblivious encoder cannot decode the message sent from another encoder, it cannot implement the Decode-and-Forward coding scheme, as is usually done in cases of partial cribbing with codebook-aware encoders. To overcome this, we introduce the method of Bin-and-Forward, which does not require decoding. Since the possible cribbed signals are not known a priori, in our new coding scheme binning is done on all typical possible cribbed sequences. Instead of sending a decoded message, the oblivious encoder sends the bin in which the cribbed sequence lies. We compare the gain achieved using cooperation and partial cribbing with and without codebook knowledge. Evidently, in the cases of causal and non-causal perfect cribbing, the capacity region is the same for oblivious and codebook-aware encoding. As an example, we consider the Gaussian MAC with cooperation and quantized cribbing. For this model, we give an achievability scheme that shows how knowing the codebooks affects the capacity region for cooperation alone, for partial cribbing alone, and for combined cooperation and partial cribbing.

In this paper we study the multiple access channel (MAC) with combined cooperation and partial cribbing and characterize its capacity region. Cooperation means that the two encoders send a message to one another via a rate-limited link prior to transmission, while partial cribbing means that each of the two encoders obtains a deterministic function of the other encoder's output with or without delay. Prior work in this field dealt separately with cooperation and partial cribbing. However, by combining these two methods we can achieve significantly higher rates. Remarkably, the capacity region does not require an additional auxiliary random variable (RV) since the purpose of both cooperation and partial cribbing is to generate a common message between the encoders. In the proof we combine methods of block Markov coding, backward decoding, double rate-splitting, and joint typicality decoding. Furthermore, we present the Gaussian MAC with combined one-sided cooperation and quantized cribbing. For this model, we give an achievability scheme that shows how many cooperation or quantization bits are required in order to achieve a Gaussian MAC with full cooperation/cribbing capacity region. After establishing our main results, we show that in a state-dependent MAC with cooperation, where the state is known at a partially cribbing encoder and at the decoder, only one auxiliary RV is needed to incorporate both the cribbing and the cooperation. However, there are cases where more than one auxiliary RV is needed, e.g., when the cooperation and cribbing are not used for the same purposes. We present a MAC with an action-dependent state where the action is based on the cooperation but not on the cribbing. Therefore, in this case more than one auxiliary RV is needed. We deduce a general rule for this result.