Capacity and Rate Regions of a Class of Broadcast Interference Channels

In this paper, a class of broadcast interference channels (BIC) is investigated, where one of the two broadcast receivers is subject to interference coming from a point-to-point transmission. For a general discrete memoryless broadcast interference channel (DM-BIC), an achievable scheme based on message splitting, superposition, and binning is proposed and a concise representation of the corresponding achievable rate region ℛ. is obtained. Two partial-order broadcast conditions interference-oblivious less noisy and interference-cognizant less noisy are defined, thereby extending the usual less noisy condition for a regular broadcast channel by taking interference into account. Under these conditions, a reduced form of ℛ is shown to be equivalent to a rate region based on a simpler scheme, where the broadcast transmitter uses only superposition. Furthermore, if interference is strong for the interference-oblivious less noisy DM-BIC, the capacity region is given by the aforementioned two equivalent rate regions. For the interference-cognizant less noisy DM-BIC, it is argued that the strong but not very strong interference condition does not exist, and in this case, the capacity region for the very strong interference is obtained. For a Gaussian broadcast interference channel, channel parameters are categorized into three regimes. For the first two regimes, which are closely related to the two partial-order broadcast conditions, achievable rate regions are derived by specializing the corresponding achievable schemes of DM-BICs with Gaussian input distributions. The entropy power inequality-based outer bounds are obtained by combining bounding techniques for a Gaussian broadcast channel and a Gaussian interference channel. These inner and outer bounds lead to either exact or approximate characterizations of capacity regions and sum capacity under various conditions. For the remaining complementing regime, inner and outer bounds are also provided.