Noisy network coding approach to the interference channel with receiver cooperation

This work proposes a new coding scheme for the discrete memoryless two-user interference channel whose receivers can cooperate to decode their desired messages. The coding scheme is built upon Han-Kobayashi rate splitting and superposition coding at the transmitters, noisy network coding, and non-unique joint decoding at the receivers. As a case study the general achievable region leads to an inner bound for the Gaussian interference channel whose receivers cooperate through rate-limited orthogonal channels. It is shown that this inner bound is equivalent to the one-round quantize-bin-and-forward inner bound established by Wang and Tse, thereby showing that noisy network coding achieves within 1 bit/s/Hz to the capacity region when the interference is strong, and achieves within 1 bit/s/Hz to the capacity region of the Gaussian compound multiple access channel with conferencing decoders regardless of channel parameters.