Capacity Results for the Multicast Cognitive Interference Channel

The capacity region of the multicast Cognitive Inter-Ference Channel (CIFC) is investigated. This channel consists of two independent transmitters that wish to multicast two different messages, each to a different set of users. In addition, one of the transmitters-commonly referred to as the cognitive transmitter-has prior non-causal knowledge of both messages to be transmitted. This scenario subsumes some long-standing open problems, such as the interference channel, the broadcast channel, and multicast communications. The aim of this paper is the derivation of optimal interference mitigation techniques under different interference regimes. To this end, two settings, namely the multi-primary CIFC, i.e., M = 1 and N >= 1, and its complementary, the multi-secondary CIFC, i.e., N = 1 and M >= 1, are investigated as an attempt to build a thorough understanding for the more general multicast CIFC setting. It is shown that, for some interference regimes, well-known coding techniques for the standard CIFC remain still optimal under the constraint of multicasting to multiple users. However, in other interference regimes, capacity achieving coding and decoding schemes prove to be more involved. A careful combination of these coding schemes and new outer bounding techniques allows to characterize the capacity region for several classes of discrete memoryless and Gaussian multicast CIFC under different interference regimes.