Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing

We explore 5  network communication problems where the possibility of interference alignment, and consequently the total number of degrees of freedom (DoF) with channel uncertainty at the transmitters,  are unknown. These problems share the common property that in each case the best known outer bounds are essentially robust to channel uncertainty and represent the outcome with interference alignment, but the best inner bounds --- in some cases conjectured to be optimal ---   predict a total collapse of DoF, thus indicating the infeasibility of interference alignment under channel uncertainty at transmitters. Our main contribution is to introduce the idea of blind interference alignment. Specifically, we show that even with no knowledge of channel coefficient values at the transmitters, the knowledge of the channels' coherence structure can be exploited to achieve interference alignment. In each case, we show that under certain heterogeneous block fading models, i.e., when certain users experience smaller coherence time/bandwidth than others,  the transmitters are able to align interference without the knowledge of channel coefficient values.