  Interference is a major issue limiting the performance in wireless networks.
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 identify two regions regarding the gain from receiver
cooperation: linear and saturation regions. In the linear region receiver
cooperation is efficient and provides a degrees-of-freedom gain, which is
either one cooperation bit buys one more bit or two cooperation bits buy one
more bit until saturation. In the saturation region receiver cooperation is
inefficient and provides a power gain, which is at most a constant regardless
of the rate at which receivers cooperate. The conclusion is drawn from the
characterization of capacity region to within two bits. The proposed 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 one receiver quantize-bin-and-forwards its received signal, and
the other after receiving the side information decode-bin-and-forwards its
received signal.
