  We consider the problem of exact support recovery of sparse signals via noisy
measurements. The main focus is the sufficient and necessary conditions on the
number of measurements for support recovery to be reliable. By drawing an
analogy between the problem of support recovery and the problem of channel
coding over the Gaussian multiple access channel, and exploiting mathematical
tools developed for the latter problem, we obtain an information theoretic
framework for analyzing the performance limits of support recovery. Sharp
sufficient and necessary conditions on the number of measurements in terms of
the signal sparsity level and the measurement noise level are derived.
Specifically, when the number of nonzero entries is held fixed, the exact
asymptotics on the number of measurements for support recovery is developed.
When the number of nonzero entries increases in certain manners, we obtain
sufficient conditions tighter than existing results. In addition, we show that
the proposed methodology can deal with a variety of models of sparse signal
recovery, hence demonstrating its potential as an effective analytical tool.
