Interference, cooperation and connectivity — A degrees of freedom perspective

We explore the interplay between interference, cooperation and connectivity in heterogeneous wireless interference networks. Specifically, we consider a 4-user locally-connected interference network with pairwise clustered decoding and show that its degrees of freedom (DoF) are bounded above by 12/5. Interestingly, when compared to the corresponding fully connected setting which is known to have 8/3 DoF, the locally connected network is only missing interference-carrying links, but still has lower DoF, i.e., eliminating these interference-carrying links reduces the DoF. The 12/5 DoF outer bound is obtained through a novel approach that translates insights from interference alignment over linear vector spaces into corresponding sub-modularity relationships between entropy functions.