Interactive Interference Alignment

We study interference channels (IFCs) where the interaction among sources and destinations is enabled, e.g., both sources and destinations can talk to each other using full-duplex radios. The interaction can come in two ways. First is through in-band interaction where sources and destinations can transmit and listen in the same channel simultaneously, enabling interaction. Second is through out-of-band interaction where destinations talk back to the sources on an out-of-band channel, which is possible from white-space channels. The flexibility afforded by the interaction among sources and destinations allows for the derivation of interference alignment (IA) strategies that have desirable “engineering properties,” i.e., insensitivity to the rationality or irrationality of channel parameters, small block lengths, and finite SNR operations. We show that, for several classes of IFCs, the interactive IA scheme can achieve the optimal degrees of freedom. In particular, we show a simple scheme (having a finite block length for channels having no diversity) for three-user and four-user IFCs with full-duplex radios to achieve the optimal degrees of freedom even after accounting for the cost of interaction. On the technical side, we show using a Gröbner basis argument that, in a general network potentially utilizing cooperation and feedback, the optimal degrees of freedom under linear schemes of a fixed block length is the same for channel coefficients with a probability of 1. Furthermore, a numerical method to estimate this value is also presented. These tools have potentially wider utility in studying other wireless networks as well.