Topological Interference Management through Index Coding

TL;DR

This paper explores how to manage interference in linear networks with limited channel knowledge by linking the problem to index coding, providing bounds and solutions for network capacity and degrees of freedom.

Contribution

It establishes a novel connection between interference management and index coding, deriving bounds and solutions for network capacity and DoF with minimal channel state information.

Findings

Network capacity and DoF are bounded by index coding solutions.

Linear solutions are equivalent for the interference and index coding problems.

Interference alignment techniques translate index coding solutions into network performance metrics.

Abstract

This work studies linear interference networks, both wired and wireless, with no channel state information at the transmitters (CSIT) except a coarse knowledge of the end-to-end one-hop topology of the network that only allows a distinction between weak (zero) and significant (non-zero) channels and no further knowledge of the channel coefficients' realizations. The network capacity (wired) and DoF (wireless) are found to be bounded above by the capacity of an index coding problem for which the antidote graph is the complement of the given interference graph. The problems are shown to be equivalent under linear solutions. An interference alignment perspective is then used to translate the existing index coding solutions into the wired network capacity and wireless network DoF solutions, as well as to find new and unified solutions to different classes of all three problems.