Interference (communication)


In telecommunications, an interference is that which modifies a signal in a disruptive manner, as it travels along a communication channel between its source and receiver. The term is often used to refer to the addition of unwanted signals to a useful signal. Common examples are:
Interference is typically but not always distinguished from noise, for example white thermal noise.
Radio resource management aims at reducing and controlling the co-channel and adjacent-channel interference.

Interference alignment

A solution to interference problems in wireless communication networks is interference alignment, which was discovered by Syed Ali Jafar at the University of California, Irvine. Specialized applications were previously studied by Yitzhak Birk and Tomer Kol for an index coding problem in 1998, and then by Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali and Abolfazl S. Motahari in the specialized context of the X channel. Interference alignment was eventually established as a general principle by Jafar and Viveck R. Cadambe in 2008, when they introduced "a mechanism to align an arbitrarily large number of interferers, leading to the surprising conclusion that wireless networks are not essentially interference limited." This led to the adoption of interference alignment in the design of wireless networks.
Jafar explained:
According to New York University senior researcher Paul Horn: