While the channel capacity of an isolated noise-limited wireless link is well-understood, the same is not true for the interference-limited wireless links that coexist in the same area and occupy the same frequency band(s). The performance of these wireless systems is coupled to each other due to the mutual interference. One such wireless scenario is modeled as a network of simultaneously communicating node pairs and is generally referred to as an interference channel (IC). The problem of characterizing the capacity of an IC is one of the most interesting and long-standing open problems in information theory.

A popular way of characterizing the capacity of an IC is to maximize the achievable sum-rate by treating interference as Gaussian noise, which is considered optimal in low-interference scenarios. While the sum-rate of the single-band SISO IC is relatively well understood, it is not so when the users have multiple-bands and multiple-antennas for transmission. Therefore, the study of the optimal sum-rate of the multi-band MIMO IC is the main goal of this thesis. The sum-rate maximization problem for these ICs is formulated and is shown to be quite similar to the one already known for single-band MIMO ICs. This problem is reduced to the problem of finding the optimal fraction of power to be transmitted over each spatial channel in each frequency band. The underlying optimization problem, being non-linear and non-convex, is difficult to solve analytically or by employing local optimization techniques. Therefore, we develop a global optimization algorithm by extending the Reformulation and Linearization Technique (RLT) based Branch and Bound (BB) strategy to find the provably optimal solution to this problem.

We further show that the spatial and spectral channels are surprisingly similar in a multi-band multi-antenna IC from a sum-rate maximization perspective. This result is especially interesting because of the dissimilarity in the way the spatial and frequency channels affect the perceived interference. As a part of this study, we also develop some rules-of-thumb regarding the optimal power allocation strategies in multi-band MIMO ICs in various interference regimes.

Due to the recent popularity of Interference Alignment (IA) as a means of approaching capacity in an IC (in high-interference regime), we also compare the sum-rates achievable by our technique to the ones achievable by IA. The results indicate that the proposed power control technique performs better than IA in the low and intermediate interference regimes. Interestingly, the performance of the power control technique improves further relative to IA with an increase in the number of orthogonal spatial or frequency channels.