An Information-Theoretic Perspective on Interference Management

Two competing paradigms of interference management are introduced via a few recent developments in network information theory. In the first “distributed network” paradigm, the network consists of autonomous cells with minimal cooperation. For the corresponding mathematical model of the “interference channel,” advanced channel coding techniques are presented, focusing mainly on the sliding-window superposition coding scheme that achieves the performance of simultaneous decoding through point-to-point channel codes and low-complexity decoding. In the second “centralized network” paradigm, the network is a group of neighboring cells connected via noiseless links. For uplink and downlink communications over this “two-hop relay network,” two coding schemes in a dual relationship—noisy network coding and distributed decode–forward—are presented that achieve capacity universally within a finite number of bits per degree of freedom.