Advanced interference management technique: potentials and limitations

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.