Optimal modulation for known interference

We present a symbol-by-symbol approach to the problem of canceling known interference at the transmitter in a communication system. In the envisioned system, the modulator maps an information symbol (taken from a finite alphabet) and an interference symbol (from the complex field) onto a transmitted constellation point. Our scheme is based on joint optimization of a modulator and demodulator, subject to a constraint on the average transmit power. The demodulator picks the information symbol (as a function of the received symbol) that minimizes the average error probability. We emphasize that our focus is on transmission in a single (complex) dimension, and hence the proposed technique is a "modulation" rather than a "coding" scheme. We illustrate that the new scheme outperforms Tomlinson-Harashima precoding, which is a classical but suboptimal solution to the one-dimensional known-interference precoding problem. In our simulations, the new approach is able to perform close to the no-interference bound.