The Capacity Region of the MIMO Interference Channel and its Reciprocity to Within a Constant Gap

Abstract: The capacity region of the 2-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Gaussian interference channel (IC) is characterized to within a constant gap that is independent of the channel matrices for the general case of the MIMO IC with an arbitrary number of antennas at each node. An achievable rate region and an outer bound to the capacity region of a class of interference channels were obtained in previous work by Telatar and Tse as unions over all possible input distributions. In contrast to that previous work on the MIMO IC, a simple and an explicit achievable coding scheme are obtained here and shown to have the constant-gap-to-capacity property and in which the sub-rates of the common and private messages of each user are explicitly specified for each achievable rate pair. The constant-gap-to-capacity results are thus proved in this work by first establishing explicit upper and lower bounds to the capacity region. A reciprocity result is also proved which is that the capacity of the reciprocal MIMO IC is within a constant gap of the capacity region of the forward MIMO IC.