A Case Where Interference Does Not Affect the Channel Dispersion

In 1975, Carleial presented a special case of an interference channel, called the very strong interference regime, in which the interference does not reduce the capacity of the constituent point-to-point Gaussian channels. In this paper, we show that in the strictly very strong interference regime, the dispersions are similarly unaffected. More precisely, in this paper, we characterize the second-order coding rates of the Gaussian interference channel in the strictly very strong interference regime. In other words, we characterize the speed of convergence of rates of optimal block codes toward a boundary point of the (rectangular) capacity region. These second-order coding rates are expressed in terms of the average probability of error and variances of appropriately defined information densities which coincide with the dispersion of the (single-user) Gaussian channel. This allows us to conclude that the dispersions are unaffected by interference in this channel model.