On the Capacity Region of the Broadcast, the Interference, and the Cognitive Radio Channels

As the main basic building blocks of the interference networks, in this paper the broadcast channel, the classical interference channel (CIC), and the cognitive radio channel (CRC) are considered. New capacity outer bounds are established for these channels. These outer bounds are all derived based on a novel unified framework. Using the derived outer bounds, some new capacity results are proved for the CIC and the CRC; a mixed interference regime is identified for the two-user CIC, where decoding interference at one receiver and treating interference as noise at the other one is sum-rate optimal. In addition, a noisy interference regime is derived for the one-sided CIC. Our new capacity theorems for the CIC contain the previously obtained results regarding the Gaussian channel as special cases. For the CRC, a full characterization of the capacity region for a class of more-capable channels is derived. Moreover, it is shown that the derived outer bounds are useful to study channels with one-sided receiver side information wherein one of the receivers has access to the nonintended message; capacity bounds are also discussed in details for such scenarios. Our results lead to new insights regarding the nature of information flow in the basic interference networks.