Advanced Interference Management Techniques: Potentials and Limitations

Abstract

Interference management has the potential to improve spectrum efficiency in current and next generation wireless systems ( e.g., 3GPP LTE and IEEE 802.11). Recently, new paradigms for interference management have emerged to tackle interference in a general class of wireless networks: interference shaping and interference exploitation. Interference shaping is a technique that creates a particular linear combination of interference signals when transmitters propagate signals to minimize the aggregated interference effect at each receiver. Interference exploitation is a method that harnesses interference in decoding as side information to improve data rates. Both approaches offer better performance in interference-limited communication regimes than traditionally thought possible. This article provides a high-level overview of several different interference shaping and exploitation techniques for single-hop, multihop, and multi-way network architectures with graphical illustrations. The article concludes with a discussion of practical challenges associated with adopting sophisticated interference management strategies in the future.