Capacity Bounds for a Class of Interference Relay Channels

The capacity of a class of Interference Relay Channels (IRC) -the Injective Semideterministic IRC where the relay can only observe one of the sources- is investigated. We first derive a novel outer bound and two inner bounds which are based on a careful use of each of the available cooperative strategies together with the adequate interference decoding technique. The outer bound extends Telatar and Tse's work while the inner bounds contain several known results in the literature as special cases. Our main result is the characterization of the capacity region of the Gaussian class of IRCs studied within a fixed number of bits per dimension -constant gap. The proof relies on the use of the different cooperative strategies in specific SNR regimes due to the complexity of the schemes. As a matter of fact, this issue reveals the complex nature of the Gaussian IRC where the combination of a single coding scheme for the Gaussian relay and interference channel may not lead to a good coding scheme for this problem, even when the focus is only on capacity to within a constant gap over all possible fading statistics.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (revised version

On the Capacity Region of the Two-user Interference Channel with a Cognitive Relay

This paper considers a variation of the classical two-user interference channel where the communication of two interfering source-destination pairs is aided by an additional node that has a priori knowledge of the messages to be transmitted, which is referred to as the it cognitive relay. For this Interference Channel with a Cognitive Relay (ICCR) In particular, for the class of injective semi-deterministic ICCRs, a sum-rate upper bound is derived for the general memoryless ICCR and further tightened for the Linear Deterministic Approximation (LDA) of the Gaussian noise channel at high SNR, which disregards the noise and focuses on the interaction among the users' signals. The capacity region of the symmetric LDA is completely characterized except for the regime of moderately weak interference and weak links from the CR to the destinations. The insights gained from the analysis of the LDA are then translated back to the symmetric Gaussian noise channel (GICCR). For the symmetric GICCR, an approximate characterization (to within a constant gap) of the capacity region is provided for a parameter regime where capacity was previously unknown. The approximately optimal scheme suggests that message cognition at a relay is beneficial for interference management as it enables simultaneous over the air neutralization of the interference at both destinations

A digital interface for Gaussian relay and interference networks: Lifting codes from the discrete superposition model

For every Gaussian network, there exists a corresponding deterministic network called the discrete superposition network. We show that this discrete superposition network provides a near-optimal digital interface for operating a class consisting of many Gaussian networks in the sense that any code for the discrete superposition network can be naturally lifted to a corresponding code for the Gaussian network, while achieving a rate that is no more than a constant number of bits lesser than the rate it achieves for the discrete superposition network. This constant depends only on the number of nodes in the network and not on the channel gains or SNR. Moreover the capacities of the two networks are within a constant of each other, again independent of channel gains and SNR. We show that the class of Gaussian networks for which this interface property holds includes relay networks with a single source-destination pair, interference networks, multicast networks, and the counterparts of these networks with multiple transmit and receive antennas. The code for the Gaussian relay network can be obtained from any code for the discrete superposition network simply by pruning it. This lifting scheme establishes that the superposition model can indeed potentially serve as a strong surrogate for designing codes for Gaussian relay networks. We present similar results for the K x K Gaussian interference network, MIMO Gaussian interference networks, MIMO Gaussian relay networks, and multicast networks, with the constant gap depending additionally on the number of antennas in case of MIMO networks.Comment: Final versio

Incremental Relaying for the Gaussian Interference Channel with a Degraded Broadcasting Relay

This paper studies incremental relay strategies for a two-user Gaussian relay-interference channel with an in-band-reception and out-of-band-transmission relay, where the link between the relay and the two receivers is modelled as a degraded broadcast channel. It is shown that generalized hash-and-forward (GHF) can achieve the capacity region of this channel to within a constant number of bits in a certain weak relay regime, where the transmitter-to-relay link gains are not unboundedly stronger than the interference links between the transmitters and the receivers. The GHF relaying strategy is ideally suited for the broadcasting relay because it can be implemented in an incremental fashion, i.e., the relay message to one receiver is a degraded version of the message to the other receiver. A generalized-degree-of-freedom (GDoF) analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime reveals that in the symmetric channel setting, each common relay bit can improve the sum rate roughly by either one bit or two bits asymptotically depending on the operating regime, and the rate gain can be interpreted as coming solely from the improvement of the common message rates, or alternatively in the very weak interference regime as solely coming from the rate improvement of the private messages. Further, this paper studies an asymmetric case in which the relay has only a single single link to one of the destinations. It is shown that with only one relay-destination link, the approximate capacity region can be established for a larger regime of channel parameters. Further, from a GDoF point of view, the sum-capacity gain due to the relay can now be thought as coming from either signal relaying only, or interference forwarding only.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Inf. Theor

Nested Lattice Codes for Gaussian Relay Networks with Interference

In this paper, a class of relay networks is considered. We assume that, at a node, outgoing channels to its neighbors are orthogonal, while incoming signals from neighbors can interfere with each other. We are interested in the multicast capacity of these networks. As a subclass, we first focus on Gaussian relay networks with interference and find an achievable rate using a lattice coding scheme. It is shown that there is a constant gap between our achievable rate and the information theoretic cut-set bound. This is similar to the recent result by Avestimehr, Diggavi, and Tse, who showed such an approximate characterization of the capacity of general Gaussian relay networks. However, our achievability uses a structured code instead of a random one. Using the same idea used in the Gaussian case, we also consider linear finite-field symmetric networks with interference and characterize the capacity using a linear coding scheme.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Computation Alignment: Capacity Approximation without Noise Accumulation

Consider several source nodes communicating across a wireless network to a destination node with the help of several layers of relay nodes. Recent work by Avestimehr et al. has approximated the capacity of this network up to an additive gap. The communication scheme achieving this capacity approximation is based on compress-and-forward, resulting in noise accumulation as the messages traverse the network. As a consequence, the approximation gap increases linearly with the network depth. This paper develops a computation alignment strategy that can approach the capacity of a class of layered, time-varying wireless relay networks up to an approximation gap that is independent of the network depth. This strategy is based on the compute-and-forward framework, which enables relays to decode deterministic functions of the transmitted messages. Alone, compute-and-forward is insufficient to approach the capacity as it incurs a penalty for approximating the wireless channel with complex-valued coefficients by a channel with integer coefficients. Here, this penalty is circumvented by carefully matching channel realizations across time slots to create integer-valued effective channels that are well-suited to compute-and-forward. Unlike prior constant gap results, the approximation gap obtained in this paper also depends closely on the fading statistics, which are assumed to be i.i.d. Rayleigh.Comment: 36 pages, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Degrees of Freedom of Two-Hop Wireless Networks: "Everyone Gets the Entire Cake"

We show that fully connected two-hop wireless networks with K sources, K relays and K destinations have K degrees of freedom both in the case of time-varying channel coefficients and in the case of constant channel coefficients (in which case the result holds for almost all values of constant channel coefficients). Our main contribution is a new achievability scheme which we call Aligned Network Diagonalization. This scheme allows the data streams transmitted by the sources to undergo a diagonal linear transformation from the sources to the destinations, thus being received free of interference by their intended destination. In addition, we extend our scheme to multi-hop networks with fully connected hops, and multi-hop networks with MIMO nodes, for which the degrees of freedom are also fully characterized.Comment: Presented at the 2012 Allerton Conference. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Interference Mitigation Through Limited Receiver Cooperation: Symmetric Case

Interference is a major issue that limits the performance in wireless networks, and cooperation among receivers can help mitigate interference by forming distributed MIMO systems. The rate at which receivers cooperate, however, is limited in most scenarios. How much interference can one bit of receiver cooperation mitigate? In this paper, we study the two-user Gaussian interference channel with conferencing decoders to answer this question in a simple setting. We characterize the fundamental gain from cooperation: at high SNR, when INR is below 50% of SNR in dB scale, one-bit cooperation per direction buys roughly one-bit gain per user until full receiver cooperation performance is reached, while when INR is between 67% and 200% of SNR in dB scale, one-bit cooperation per direction buys roughly half-bit gain per user. The conclusion is drawn based on the approximate characterization of the symmetric capacity in the symmetric set-up. We propose strategies achieving the symmetric capacity universally to within 3 bits. The strategy consists of two parts: (1) the transmission scheme, where superposition encoding with a simple power split is employed, and (2) the cooperative protocol, where quantize-binning is used for relaying.Comment: To appear in IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Taormina, October 2009. Final versio

Amplify-and-Forward in Wireless Relay Networks

A general class of wireless relay networks with a single source-destination pair is considered. Intermediate nodes in the network employ an amplify-and-forward scheme to relay their input signals. In this case the overall input-output channel from the source via the relays to the destination effectively behaves as an intersymbol interference channel with colored noise. Unlike previous work we formulate the problem of the maximum achievable rate in this setting as an optimization problem with no assumption on the network size, topology, and received signal-to-noise ratio. Previous work considered only scenarios wherein relays use all their power to amplify their received signals. We demonstrate that this may not always maximize the maximal achievable rate in amplify-and-forward relay networks. The proposed formulation allows us to not only recover known results on the performance of the amplify-and-forward schemes for some simple relay networks but also characterize the performance of more complex amplify-and-forward relay networks which cannot be addressed in a straightforward manner using existing approaches. Using cut-set arguments, we derive simple upper bounds on the capacity of general wireless relay networks. Through various examples, we show that a large class of amplify-and-forward relay networks can achieve rates within a constant factor of these upper bounds asymptotically in network parameters.Comment: Minor revision: fixed a typo in eqn. reference, changed the formatting. 30 pages, 8 figure