Simultaneous Water Filling in Mutually Interfering Systems

In this paper we investigate properties of simultaneous water filling for a wireless system with two mutually interfering transmitters and receivers with non-cooperative coding strategies. This is slightly different from the traditional interference channel problem which assumes that transmitters cooperate in their respective coding strategies, and that interference cancellation can be performed at the receivers. In this noncooperative setup, greedy capacity optimization by individual transmitters through various algorithms leads to simultaneous water filling fixed points where the spectrum of the transmit covariance matrix of one user water fills over the spectrum of its corresponding interference-plus-noise covariance matrix, and in our paper we study the properties of these fixed points. We show that at a simultaneous water filling point the eigenvectors of transmit covariance matrices at each receiver are aligned, and identify three regimes which correspond to simultaneous water filling that depend on the interference gains: a) complete spectral overlap, b) partial spectral overlap, and c) spectral segregation. These imply that the transmit covariance matrices will be white in regions of both overlap and segregation, but not necessarily white overall. We also consider performance as a function of interference gain and show that complete spectral overlap is a strongly suboptimal solution over a wide range of gains. Overall, our results suggest that for strong mutual interference, an effort should be made to do joint decoding over receivers since such collaboration can provide large capacity increases. For moderate interference, distributed and/or centralized conflict resolution algorithms would be most effective since more complex collaborative methods do not afford much improvement and strictly greedy methods such as water filling perform poorly, while for weak interference a laissez faire approach seems reasonable