Topological Interference Management

Professor Sayed Ali Jafar
Professor, University of California, Irvine
Given on: Oct 17th, 2013

Abstract

We will revisit the robust principles of ignoring interference when it is weak and avoiding it when it is strong, in both cases exploring information theoretic optimality with very limited channel knowledge at the transmitters. Optimal interference avoidance will be shown to be essentially equivalent to the index coding problem which will be explored from an interference alignment perspective. Ignoring interference, i.e., treating interference as noise will be shown to be optimal for the entire capacity region (within a constant gap) if for each user, desired signal strength is no weaker than the sum of the strengths of the strongest interference caused by the user and the strongest interference suffered by the user, with all signal strengths measured in dB scale.

Biography

Syed Ali Jafar received his B. Tech. from IIT Delhi, India, in 1997, M.S. from Caltech, USA, in 1999, and Ph.D. from Stanford, USA, in 2003, all in Electrical Engineering. 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 at the University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA USA. 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 Information Theory Society paper award in 2009, the Maseeh Outstanding Research Award in 2010, an IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award in 2012 and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2013. Dr. Jafar received the UC Irvine EECS Professor of the Year award four times, in 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2012, from the Engineering Students Council and the Teaching Excellence Award in 2012 from the School of Engineering. He was a University of Canterbury Erskine Fellow in 2010 and is an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2013-2014. Dr. Jafar served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications 2004-2009, for IEEE Communications Letters 2008-2009 and for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2009-2012.