On the Capacity and Degrees of Freedom Regions of MIMO Interference Channels with Limited Receiver Cooperation

This paper gives the approximate capacity region of a two-user MIMO interference channel with limited receiver cooperation, where the gap between the inner and outer bounds is in terms of the total number of receive antennas at the two receivers and is independent of the actual channel values. The approximate capacity region is then used to find the degrees of freedom region. For the special case of symmetric interference channels, we also find the amount of receiver cooperation in terms of the backhaul capacity beyond which the degrees of freedom do not improve. Further, the generalized degrees of freedom are found for MIMO interference channels with equal number of antennas at all nodes. It is shown that the generalized degrees of freedom improve gradually from a "W" curve to a "V" curve with increase in cooperation in terms of the backhaul capacity.