Fundamentals of Treating Interference as Noise

OF THE DISSERTATIONFundamentals of Treating Interference as NoiseByChunhua GengDoctor of Philosophy in Electrical EngineeringUniversity of California, Irvine, 2016Professor Syed Jafar, Chair Treating interference as noise (TIN) when it is sufficiently weak is one of the key principlesof interference management for wireless networks. This dissertation revisits the optimalityof TIN from an information theoretic perspective. It is shown that for K-user Gaussianinterference channels, TIN achieves all points in the capacity region to within a constantgap, if for each user, the desired signal strength is no weaker than the sum of the strengthsof the strongest interference caused by the user and the strongest interference suffered by theuser (with all signal strengths measured in dB scale). We also extend the optimality of TIN tomore general settings, including interference networks with general message sets, compoundnetworks and MIMO interference channels, and characterize the secure capacity region withina constant gap for the identified TIN-optimal interference channels with secrecy constraints.Moreover, combining TIN with interference avoidance, we formulate a joint signal space andsignal level optimization problem and propose a baseline decomposition approach.