Cooperation is viewed as a key ingredient for interference management in
wireless systems. This paper shows that cooperation has fundamental
limitations. The main result is that even full cooperation between transmitters
cannot in general change an interference-limited network to a noise-limited
network. The key idea is that there exists a spectral efficiency upper bound
that is independent of the transmit power. First, a spectral efficiency upper
bound is established for systems that rely on pilot-assisted channel
estimation; in this framework, cooperation is shown to be possible only within
clusters of limited size, which are subject to out-of-cluster interference
whose power scales with that of the in-cluster signals. Second, an upper bound
is also shown to exist when cooperation is through noncoherent communication;
thus, the spectral efficiency limitation is not a by-product of the reliance on
pilot-assisted channel estimation. Consequently, existing literature that
routinely assumes the high-power spectral efficiency scales with the log of the
transmit power provides only a partial characterization. The complete
characterization proposed in this paper subdivides the high-power regime into a
degrees-of-freedom regime, where the scaling with the log of the transmit power
holds approximately, and a saturation regime, where the spectral efficiency
hits a ceiling that is independent of the power. Using a cellular system as an
example, it is demonstrated that the spectral efficiency saturates at power
levels of operational relevance.Comment: 27 page
