Rate-Diversity Trade-offs in Interference Channels with and without Cooperation

We study the Gaussian interference channel in which independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading exists between any two nodes. Firstly we find the rate-diversity relationship for three well-known transmission/reception strategies. Out of these we see the best trade-off is obtained when each receiver decodes both transmitter messages jointly, akin to two multiple access channels. With a view to increasing diversity two more schemes are then considered for the interference channel, now allowing cooperation between nodes. One scheme is shown to increase diversity up to a factor of three while reducing rate by four, while the other doubles diversity but cuts rate by a factor of three.