A Survey on Interference Networks: Interference Alignment and Neutralization

In recent years, there has been rapid progress on understanding Gaussian networks with multiple unicast connections, and new coding techniques have emerged. The essence of multi-source networks is how to efficiently manage interference that arises from the transmission of other sessions. Classically, interference is removed by orthogonalization (in time or frequency). This means that the rate per session drops inversely proportional to the number of sessions, suggesting that interference is a strong limiting factor in such networks. However, recently discovered interference management techniques have led to a paradigm shift that interference might not be quite as detrimental after all. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of these new coding techniques as they apply to the case of time-varying Gaussian networks with multiple unicast connections. Specifically, we review interference alignment and ergodic interference alignment for multi-source single-hop networks and interference neutralization and ergodic interference neutralization for multi-source multi-hop networks. We mainly focus on the “degrees of freedom” perspective and also discuss an approximate capacity characterization.