Feedback Capacity of the Gaussian Interference Channel to Within 1.7075 Bits: the Symmetric Case

TL;DR

This paper precisely characterizes the symmetric capacity of the two-user Gaussian interference channel with feedback within 1.7075 bits, revealing that feedback can provide unbounded capacity gains under certain conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a new outer bound and achievable scheme that together establish the capacity approximation, demonstrating unbounded feedback gains in specific scenarios.

Findings

Feedback can achieve unbounded capacity gain in certain channel conditions.

The symmetric capacity is characterized within 1.7075 bits for all parameters.

A new outer bound and scheme are proposed for the Gaussian interference channel.

Abstract

We characterize the symmetric capacity to within 1.7075 bits/s/Hz for the two-user Gaussian interference channel with feedback. The result makes use of a deterministic model to provide insights into the Gaussian channel. We derive a new outer bound to show that a proposed achievable scheme can achieve the symmetric capacity to within 1.7075 bits for all channel parameters. From this result, we show that feedback provides unbounded gain, i.e., the gain becomes arbitrarily large for certain channel parameters. It is a surprising result because feedback has been so far known to provide only power gain (bounded gain) in the context of multiple access channels and broadcast channels.