On the Corner Points of the Capacity Region of a Gaussian Interference Channel

Dr. Igal Sason

Associate Professor
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering
Meyer Building, office 652
Haifa 32000, Israel

Abstract:

This work considers the corner points of the capacity region of a two-user Gaussian interference channel (IC). The problem has originated in a paper by Costa (1985), and it was followed by a note that raised an issue and called for further study of these corner points. The operational meaning of this study is to explore the situation where one transmitter sends its information at the maximal achievable rate for a single-user (without interference), and the second transmitter needs to keep its data rate below a certain value in order to achieve reliable communication at the two non-cooperating receivers. The analysis in this paper relies on existing outer bounds on the capacity region of a two-user Gaussian IC, leading to informative bounds for these corner points. For weak interference, where the interference coefficients in standard form are below 1, the resulting bounds are asymptotically tight when the transmitted powers tend to infinity, and the corner points coincide in this case with their conjectured values (Costa, 1985). Furthermore, the precision of the assessment of the two corner points for a Gaussian IC with weak interference is high even for moderate signal-to-noise and interference-to-noise ratios. For weak interference, the sub-optimality of these corner points is considered by a derivation of upper and lower bounds on the gap between the sum-rate and the maximal total rate at these corner points. This work also considers the corner points for a Gaussian IC with mixed interference, and a one-sided Gaussian IC with reference to some prior works.

Biography:

Igal Sason received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 1992 and 2001, respectively. From 1993 to 1998 he worked as an electrical engineer. From 1998 to 2001, he was a PhD student and a teaching assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion. During 2001 - 2003, he was a scientific collaborator at the Faculty of Computer Science and Communications, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 2003, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion where he is currently an Associate Professor (with tenure). His research interests include information theory and coding. Dr. Sason is a co-recipient of the 2003 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award. From 2008 to 2011 he served as an Associate Editor for Coding Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and he also served as a Program Co-Chair for the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2013).