This paper studies the two-user interference channel with unilateral source cooperation, which consists of two source-destination pairs that share the same channel and where one full-duplex source can overhear the other source through a noisy in-band link. Novel outer bounds of the type 2R1 + R2 and R1 + 2R2 are developed for the class of injective semi-deterministic channels with independent noises at the different source-destination pairs. The bounds are then specialized to the Gaussian noise case. Interesting insights are provided about when these types of bounds are active, or in other words, when unilateral cooperation is too weak and leaves some system resources underutilized.
An Interference Channel with Generalized Feedback (IFC-GF) models a wireless network where the sources can sense the channel activity. The signal overheard from the channel provides information about the activity of the other sources and thus furnishes the basis for cooperation. This two-part paper studies achievable strategies (Part I) and outer bounds (Part II) for the general discrete memoryless IFC-GF with two source-destination pairs. In Part I, the generalized feedback is used to gain knowledge about the message sent by the other source and then exploited in two ways: a) to relay the messages that can be decoded at both destinations, thus realizing the gains of beam-forming of a distributed multiantenna system, and b) to hide the messages that can not be decoded at the nonintended destination, thus leveraging the interference “precancellation” property of dirty-paper coding. We show that our achievable region generalizes several known achievable regions for the IFC-GF and that it reduces to known achievable regions for the channels subsumed by the IFC-GF model. For the Gaussian channel, it is shown that source cooperation enlarges the achievable rate region of the corresponding IFC without generalized feedback cooperation. The capacity region of the Gaussian interference channel with two source-destination pairs where the sources can cooperate is not known. Prabhakaran and Viswanath showed that the sum-rate capacity can be achieved to within 19 bits s Hz by using a combination of superposition coding and zero-forcing. This paper only focuses on the symmetric capacity, i.e., the maximum equal rate point that the two sources can simultaneously achieve in a Gaussian interference channel with symmetric channel gains, in the strong cooperation regime, i.e., when the cooperation link is stronger than either the direct link or the interference link. In this setting, it is showed that the “binning+superposition” achievable scheme of Yang and Tuninetti, implemented with Gaussian codebooks and Dirty Paper Coding, achieves the symmetric capacity to within 2 bits s Hz-thereby considerably reducing the previously known gap. The extension of this gap-result to other regimes is also discussed. In a cooperative diversity network, users cooperate to transmit each others' messages; to some extent nodes therefore collectively act as an antenna array and create a virtual or distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. In this paper, upper and lower bounds for the information-theoretic capacity of four-node ad hoc networks with two transmitters and two receivers using cooperative diversity are derived. One of the gains in a true MIMO system is a multiplexing gain in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, an extra factor in front of the log in the capacity expression. It is shown that cooperative diversity gives no such multiplexing gain, but it does give a high SNR additive gain, which is characterized in the paper In this paper, the role of cooperation in managing interference-a fundamental feature of the wireless channel-is investigated by studying the two-user Gaussian interference channel where the source nodes can both transmit and receive in full duplex. The sum capacity of this channel is obtained within a gap of a constant number of bits. The coding scheme used builds up on the superposition scheme of Han and Kobayashi for the two-user interference channel without cooperation. New upperbounds on the sum capacity are also derived. The same coding scheme is shown to obtain the sum capacity of the symmetric two-user Gaussian interference channel with noiseless feedback within a constant gap. Interference Channels with Generalized Feedback (IFC-GF) are a model for wireless communication systems with source cooperation. GF enables to enlarge the achievable rate region with respect to the non-cooperative IFC without requiring an increase in system resources. This paper develops an outer bound region on the capacity of general IFC-GF and then tighten it further for a class of semi-deterministic IFC-GF that include the “high SNR approximation” of the Gaussian channel and the Gaussian channel as special cases.