Feedback Capacity of the Gaussian Interference Channel to within 2 Bits

Abstract

We characterize the capacity region to within 2 bits/s/Hz and the symmetric capacity to within 1 bit/s/Hz for the two-user Gaussian interference channel (IC) with feedback. We develop achievable schemes and derive a new outer bound to arrive at this conclusion. One consequence of the result is that feedback provides multiplicative gain, i.e., the gain becomes arbitrarily large for certain channel parameters. It is a surprising result because feedback has been so far known to provide no gain in memoryless point-to-point channels and only bounded additive gain in multiple access channels. The gain comes from using feedback to maximize resource utilization, thereby enabling more efficient resource sharing between the interfering users. The result makes use of a deterministic model to provide insights into the Gaussian channel. This deterministic model is a special case of El Gamal-Costa deterministic model and as a side-generalization, we establish the exact feedback capacity region of this general class of deterministic ICs.