A central feature of wireless networks is multiple users sharing a common medium. Cellular systems are among the most common examples of such networks. The main phenomenon resulting from this inter-user interaction is interference, and thus analyzing interference networks is critical to determine the capacity of wireless networks. The capacity region of an interference network is defined as the set of rates that the users can simultaneously achieve while ensuring arbitrarily small probability of decoding error. It is an inherently hard problem to find the capacity region of interference networks. Even the capacity region of a general 2-user interference channel is a prominent open problem in information theory. This work's goal is to derive achievable regions that are improved over known results, and when possible, capacity theorems, for K user interference networks. Another multiuser channel that is commonly found in wireless systems is a broadcast channel. Broadcast channels stand side by side with Interference channels as the two of the most important channels for which capacity results are still not completely known. In this work we develop inner and outer bounds on the capacity region of fading broadcast channels, using which we find a part of the capacity region under some conditions. In summary, this work first presents coding arguments for new achievable rate regions and, where possible, capacity results for K-user interference networks. Second, it provides inner and outer-bounds for a class of fading broadcast channels. / text

A Broadcast Channel is a communication path between a single source and two or more receivers or users. The source intends to communicate independent information to the users. A particular case of interest is the Gaussian Broadcast Channel (GBC) where the noise at each user is additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The capacity region of GBC is well known and the input to the channel is distributed as Gaussian. The capacity region of another special case of GBC namely Fading Broadcast Channel (FBC)was given in [Li and Goldsmith, 2001]and was shown that superposition of Gaussian codes is optimal for the FBC (treated as a vector degraded Broadcast Channel). The capacity region obtained when the input to the channel is distributed uniformly over a finite alphabet(Constellation)is termed as Constellation Constrained(CC) capacity region [Biglieri 2005]. In this thesis the CC capacity region for two-user GBC and the FBC are obtained. In case of GBC the idea of superposition coding with input from finite alphabet and CC capacity was explored in [Hupert and Bossert, 2007]but with some limitations. When the participating individual signal sets are nearly equal i.e., given total average power constraint P the rate reward α (also the power sharing parameter) is approximately equal to 0.5, we show via simulation that with rotation of one of the signal sets by an appropriate angle the CC capacity region is maximally enlarged. We analytically derive the expression for optimal angle of rotation. In case of FBC a heuristic power allocation procedure called finite-constellation power allocation procedure is provided through which it is shown (via simulation)that the ergodic CC capacity region thus obtained completely subsumes the ergodic CC capacity region obtained by allocating power using the procedure given in[Li and Goldsmith, 2001].It is shown through simulations that rotating one of the signal sets by an optimal angle (obtained by trial and error method)for a given α maximally enlarges the ergodic CC capacity region when finite-constellation power allocation is used. An expression for determining the optimal angle of rotation for the given fading state, is obtained. And the effect of rotation is maximum around the region corresponding to α =0.5. For both GBC and FBC superposition coding is done at the transmitter and successive decoding is carried out at the receivers.