Interference Channels With Arbitrarily Correlated Sources

Communicating arbitrarily correlated sources over interference channels is considered in this paper. A sufficient condition is found for the lossless transmission of a pair of correlated sources over a discrete memoryless interference channel. With independent sources, the sufficient condition reduces to the Han-Kobayashi achievable rate region for the interference channel. For a special correlation structure (in the sense of Slepian-Wolf, 1973), the proposed region reduces to the known achievable region for interference channels with common information. A simple example is given to show that the separation approach, with Slepian-Wolf encoding followed by optimal channel coding, is strictly suboptimal.