K-user Interference Channels: General Outer Bound and Sum-capacity for Certain Gaussian Channels

This paper derives an outer bound on the capacity region of a general memoryless interference channel with an arbitrary number of users. The derivation follows from a generalization of the techniques developed by Kramer and by Etkin et al for the Gaussian two-user channel. The derived bound is the first known outer bound valid for any memoryless channel. In Gaussian noise, classes of channels for which the proposed bound gives the sum-rate capacity are identified, including degraded channels and a class of Z-channels.