Partial zero-forcing precoding for the interference channel with partially cooperating transmitters

A communication model is considered in which the classic two-user Gaussian interference channel is augmented by noiseless rate-limited digital conferencing links between the transmitters. We propose a partial zero-forcing precoding strategy based on a shared-private rate splitting scheme at the transmitter, in which each transmitter communicates part of its message to the other transmitter, and subsequently partially pre-subtracts the interfering signal using a zero-forcing precoder. We prove an outer bound and show that the proposed strategy is asymptotically sum-capacity achieving in a very weak interference regime, where both the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the interference-to-noise ratio (INR) go to infinity while their ratio in dB scale is kept fixed. In this case, every cooperation bit results in one-bit gain in sum capacity. We also consider a different asymptotic regime where the transmit power constraints and the channel gains are fixed while the noise powers go down to zero. In this case, if one compares with the achievable sum rate with interference treated as noise, one cooperation bit can in fact result in more than one-bit gain in achievable sum rate.