A Tutorial on Interference Alignment

Farzad Talebi Abstract As an inevitable phenomenon in wireless networks, interference has been always an important concern in designing communication networks. There are some conventional interference management approaches which will be mentioned here. The important note about all these approaches is that using them, the sum-capacity of the network will be limited by interference, regardless of the number of users, or the approach itself cannot be generalized for more than two user cases. Interference alignment is a surprising approach with which the sum-capacity of the time-varying interference networks using limited resources e.g. time, frequency, can be increased linearly with the number of users. Some special cases in which interference alignment can be interpreted easily will be presented, and the cases of imperfect or limited channel state information, which is necessary for this approach, will also be provided. Finally, an overview of benefits and challenges of the interference alignment approach will be discussed.