Simultaneous nonunique decoding is rate-optimal

It is shown that simultaneous nonunique decoding is rate-optimal for the general K-sender, L-receiver discrete memoryless interference channel when encoding is restricted to randomly generated codebooks, superposition coding, and time sharing. This result implies that the Han-Kobayashi inner bound for the two-user-pair interference channel cannot be improved simply by using a better decoder such as the maximum likelihood decoder. It also generalizes and extends previous results by Baccelli, El Gamal, and Tse on Gaussian interference channels with point-to-point Gaussian random codebooks and shows that the Cover-van der Meulen inner bound with no common auxiliary random variable on the capacity region of the broadcast channel can be improved to include the superposition coding inner bound simply by using simultaneous nonunique decoding. The key to proving the main result is to show that after a maximal set of messages has been recovered, the remaining signal at each receiver is distributed essentially independently and identically.