A new outer bound on the capacity region of Gaussian interference channels is
developed. The bound combines and improves existing genie-aided methods and is
shown to give the sum-rate capacity for noisy interference as defined in this
paper. Specifically, it is shown that if the channel coefficients and power
constraints satisfy a simple condition then single-user detection at each
receiver is sum-rate optimal, i.e., treating the interference as noise incurs
no loss in performance. This is the first concrete (finite signal-to-noise
ratio) capacity result for the Gaussian interference channel with weak to
moderate interference. Furthermore, for certain mixed (weak and strong)
interference scenarios, the new outer bounds give a corner point of the
capacity region.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory