A survey on robust interference management in wireless networks

Abstract

Recent advances in the characterization of fundamental limits on interference managementin wireless networks and the discovery of new communication schemes on how to handle interferenceled to a better understanding towards the capacity of such networks. The benefits in terms ofachievable rates of powerful schemes handling interference, such as interference alignment, aresubstantial. However, the main issue behind most of these results is the assumption of perfect channelstate information at the transmitters (CSIT). In the absence of channel knowledge the performanceof various interference networks collapses to what is achievable by time division multiple access(TDMA). Robustinterference management techniques are promising solutions to maintain highachievable rates at various levels of CSIT, ranging from delayed to imperfect CSIT. In this survey,we outline and study two main research perspectives of how to robustly handle interference forcases where CSIT is imprecise on examples for non-distributed and distributed networks, namelybroadcast and X-channel. To quantify the performance of these schemes, we use the well-known(generalized) degrees of freedom (GDoF) metric as the pre-log factor of achievable rates. Theseperspectives maintain the capacity benefits at similar levels as for perfect channel knowledge. Thesetwo perspectives are: First, scheme-adaptation that explicitly accounts for the level of channelknowledge and, second, relay-aided infrastructure enlargement to decrease channel knowledgedependency. The relaxation on CSIT requirements through these perspectives will ultimately leadto practical realizations of robust interference management techniques. The survey concludes witha discussion of open problems.