Fundamental Aspects of Cooperative Interference Management

Sammanfattning: Today and future wireless networks are facing one of their greatest limiting factors:interference. This is due to the unprecedented increase in the number of connecteddevices. Therefore, in order to meet the ever increasing demand for data rate andquality of services, more advanced techniques than what we have today are requiredto deal with interference. This thesis takes a step towards interference managementin multiuser wireless systems by means of relaying and cooperation. We study fourfundamental building blocks in network information theory, propose new codingschemes, and derive limits on the capacity regions.The first problem we consider is the one-sided interference channel with bidirectional and rate-limited receiver cooperation. We propose a coding scheme that tailors two versions of superposition coding with classical relaying protocols. Theproposed scheme unifies and recovers previous results for the unidirectional coop-eration, yet in simpler forms. Analytical and numerical results confirm the benefitsof cooperation and illuminate the ideas behind the coding strategy.The second problem generalizes the first one by allowing the existence of bothcrossover links in the channel. We propose a coding scheme for this channel byextending noisy network coding to encompass rate-splitting at the encoders. Theachievable rate region is shown to be the same as a region achieved by explicitbinning. As a corollary, we prove that noisy network coding achieves the capacityregion of the Gaussian channel within 1 bit, under strong interference. Our resultis among the first to show constant-gap optimality of noisy network coding for amultiple-unicast problem, and to demonstrate equivalence in terms of achievablerates of two different coding approaches for a noisy interference network.We follow up by introducing a dedicated relay into the interference channelwhich simultaneously helps both receivers. For this third problem, the interferencechannel with a relay, we propose new coding schemes based on layered codes for long- and short-message quantize-forward techniques. The short-message schemesshow improvements in the achievable rates compared to other known coding tech-niques, especially when the channel is asymmetric, while relaxing the excessive delayissue of the long-message scheme. The analysis also reveals the trade-off betweenachievable rates, encoding and decoding delays, and complexity.In the fourth problem, we propose a new model for cooperative communication,the interfering relay channels, which consists of two neighboring relay channelsinducing interference to each other. Each relay, by utilizing a finite-capacity andnoise-free link to its own receiver, helps the receiver decode the desired message.We characterize the exact and approximate capacity region and sum-capacity forvarious classes of channels. The established results generalize and unify severalknown results for the relay and interference channels.The methods and results shown in this thesis aim at providing insight intopotential techniques for cooperative interference management in real-world systems.