Distributed quantum dense coding.

We introduce the notion of distributed quantum dense coding, i.e., the generalization of quantum dense coding to more than one sender and more than one receiver. We show that global operations (as compared to local operations) of the senders do not increase the information transfer capacity, in the case of a single receiver. For the case of two receivers, using local operations and classical communication, a nontrivial upper bound for the capacity is derived. We propose a general classification scheme of quantum states according to their usefulness for dense coding. In the bipartite case (for any dimensions), bound entanglement is not useful for this task.