Introduction to the Special Issue on Interference Networks - IEEE Xplore

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, VOL. 57, NO. 5, MAY 2011

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Introduction to the Special Issue on Interference Networks NTERFERENCE NETWORKS capture at their heart almost any multi-user communication system in operation today. Interference is the bane of wireless, DSL, optical and powerline communication systems, chip layout and design, sensing and multimodal imaging systems, and many others, and thus, interference network analysis has many applications, some of which are well known and some yet to be uncovered. Regardless of the domain to which interference networks apply, the interference channel remains to this day the most basic and meaningful abstraction. Introduced by Ahlswede in his paper “The capacity region of a channel with two senders and two receivers” in Annals of Probability, 1974, the interference channel incorporates two signals interfering with one another from two independent sources, the focal point of more general interference systems and networks. The limits of this basic and elegant abstraction of interference has remained an open problem for over three decades, even in the discrete-memoryless and Gaussian cases. After an initial flurry of results for the interference channel in the eighties, a lull followed. Fortunately, the wireless revolution of the 1990s and the previous decade fueled a resurgence in research on interference networks, leading to many fundamental results. This resurgence caused multiple communities, including communications and signal processing, information theory, networking, and others to work together in an unprecedented fashion to solve problems faced by interference networks. This special issue came into existence due to our firm belief that these recent discoveries will have a tremendous long-term impact on the way systems with interference are designed and operated. It is tradition for the editorial to present short summaries of the papers included with the special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. Given the detail included in the papers and already bulky size of the issue, we forego this tradition in favor of a more general overview of the contents of this issue. A majority of the papers focus on capacity analysis of the interference channel and its variants, with some of them bringing out synergies between interference

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network capacity analysis and coding theory, game theory, control theory, electromagnetics and physics, and other fields. Many others take a systems view of interference by analyzing cellular systems, mesh networks, and mobile ad hoc networks. Regardless of the approach (elemental versus overall system), each paper brings forth insights into the limits and the design of interference networks, and we hope that these insights will be carried to practical deployments of interference networks in the not-so-distant future. The guest editors would like to thank Pedrag Spasojevic´ who served as publications editor and the numerous unnamed reviewers who helped us complete the review process in record time to keep the special issue on time and on track. We received many more good papers than we could incorporate in the special issue, and so we thank all authors who chose to submit their work to the special issue regardless of whether it was included. In summary, we are thrilled to bring this very-special special issue to you, and we hope you share our sense of excitement. Papers in this special issue are by no means the last word on fundamental limits and algorithms for interference networks or its applications. Indeed, exact characterizations of fundamental limits of a majority of interference networks still remain unknown. This special issue is representative of our current spectrum of knowledge on interference networks and is designed to set the stage for future advances in the field by providing a single repository that makes our current understanding of interference networks easily accessible to domain experts and laypeople alike.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIT.2011.2116530

0018-9448/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE

A. S. AVESTIMEHR, Guest Editor H. EL GAMAL Guest Editor S. A. JAFAR, Guest Editor S. ULUKUS, Guest Editor S. VISHWANATH, Guest Editor

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, VOL. 57, NO. 5, MAY 2011

A. Salman Avestimehr (S’04–M’09) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2003, and the M.S. degree in 2005 and the Ph.D. degree in 2008, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from the University of California (UC), Berkeley. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where he has co-founded the Foundations of Information Engineering (FoIE) Laboratory. He was also a postdoctoral scholar in the Center for Mathematics of Information (CMI) at Caltech in 2008. His research interests include information theory, communications, and networking. Dr. Avestimehr has received a number of awards, including the 2011 Young Investigator Program (YIP) award from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the NSF CAREER award (2010), the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize from the U.C. Berkeley EECS Department (2008), and the Vodafone U.S. Foundation Fellows Initiative Research Merit Award (2005).

Hesham El Gamal (F’10) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1993 and 1996, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1999. From 1993 to 1996, he served as a Project Manager in the Middle East Regional Office of Alcatel Telecom. From 1996 to 1999, he was a Research Assistant in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park. From February 1999 to December 2000, he was with the Advanced Development Group, Hughes Network Systems (HNS), Germantown, MD, as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff. Since January 2001, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, The Ohio State University (OSU), where he is now a Professor. He has held visiting appointments at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Institut Eurecom, and he served as a Founding Director for the Wireless Intelligent Networks Center (WINC) at Nile University (2007–2009). Dr. El Gamal is a recipient of the HNS Annual Achievement Award (2000), the OSU College of Engineering Lumley Research Award (2003, 2008), the OSU Electrical Engineering Department FARMER Young Faculty Development Fund (2003–2008), the OSU Stanley E. Harrison Award (2008), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004). He holds ten patents and has nine more pending applications. He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS (2001–2005), as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING (2003–2007), as a Guest Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY Special Issue on Cooperative Communications (2007), as a member of the SP4COM technical committee (2002–2005), as a co-chair of the Globecom’08 Communication Theory Symposium, and as a co-chair of the 2010 IEEE Information Theory Workshop.

Syed Ali Jafar received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India in 1997, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 2003. His industry experience includes positions at Lucent Bell Labs, Qualcomm, Inc., and Hughes Software Systems. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California (UC), Irvine. His research interests include multiuser information theory and wireless communications. Dr. Jafar received the NSF CAREER award in 2006, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2008, the IEEE Information Theory Society paper award in 2009, and the Fariborz Maseeh Outstanding Research Award in 2010. He received the UC Irvine Engineering Faculty of the Year award in 2006 and the UC Irvine EECS Professor of the Year Award in 2009, for excellence in teaching. He served as Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS 2004–2009, the IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS 2008–2009, and is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, VOL. 57, NO. 5, MAY 2011

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Sennur Ulukus received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, in 1998. During her Ph.D. studies, she was with the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), Rutgers University. From 1998 to 2001, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member at AT&T Labs-Research, NJ. In 2001, she joined the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a joint appointment at the Institute for Systems Research (ISR). Her research interests are in wireless communication theory and networking, network information theory for wireless networks, signal processing for wireless communications, and security for multi-user wireless communications. Dr. Ulukus is a recipient of the 2005 NSF CAREER Award and a co-recipient of the 2003 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. She serves/has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY since 2007; as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS from 2003–2007; as a Guest Editor for the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS for the Special Issue on Multiuser Detection for Advanced Communication Systems and Networks; as a co-chair of the Communication Theory Symposium at the 2007 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference; as a co-chair of the Medium Access Control (MAC) Track at the 2008 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference; as a co-chair of the Wireless Communications Symposium at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications; as a co-chair of the 2011 IEEE Communication Theory Workshop; as a co-chair of the Physical-Layer Security Workshop at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Communications; and as the Secretary of the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC) during 2007–2009.

Sriram Vishwanath received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, India, in 1998, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 2003. His industry experience includes positions at Lucent Bell Labs and National Semiconductor Corporation. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas, Austin. His research interests include network information theory, wireless systems, and mobile systems. Dr. Vishwanath received the NSF CAREER award in 2005 and the ARO Young Investigator Award in 2008. He is a co-recipient of the 2005 IEEE Joint Information Theory Society and Communications Society best paper award. He has served as the general chair of the IEEE Wireless Network Coding conference (WiNC) in 2010, and the local arrangements chair of ISIT 2010.