Topological Interference Management

Abstract

Studies of the degrees of Freedom (DoF) of wireless communication networks often focus on clever ways to exploit an abundance of channel knowledge which is rarely available in practice while ignoring topological aspects that are the basis of most robust interference management schemes. Topological interference management refers to a complementary perspective where the focus is on exploiting network topology under limited channel knowledge. Progress in this direction includes the discovery that optimal interference avoidance is essentially the index coding problem, that interference alignment plays a central role in this problem even though no precise knowledge of channel realizations is available, a new set of conditions for the approximate optimality of treating interference as noise, novel outer bounds based on aligned image sets, and connections to network coding problems such as distributed storage repair, multiple unicasts and private information retrieval. This talk will summarize the advances in topological interference management and highlight some of the key open problems.