  Interference is a major issue that limits the performance in wireless
networks, and cooperation among receivers can help mitigate interference by
forming distributed MIMO systems. The rate at which receivers cooperate,
however, is limited in most scenarios. How much interference can one bit of
receiver cooperation mitigate? In this paper, we study the two-user Gaussian
interference channel with conferencing decoders to answer this question in a
simple setting. We characterize the fundamental gain from cooperation: at high
SNR, when INR is below 50% of SNR in dB scale, one-bit cooperation per
direction buys roughly one-bit gain per user until full receiver cooperation
performance is reached, while when INR is between 67% and 200% of SNR in dB
scale, one-bit cooperation per direction buys roughly half-bit gain per user.
The conclusion is drawn based on the approximate characterization of the
symmetric capacity in the symmetric set-up. We propose strategies achieving the
symmetric capacity universally to within 3 bits. The strategy consists of two
parts: (1) the transmission scheme, where superposition encoding with a simple
power split is employed, and (2) the cooperative protocol, where
quantize-binning is used for relaying.
