Recent advances in interference management for wireless networks

Interference has been the central challenge for wireless networks. In wireless networking, the prevailing paradigm to handle interference is avoidance. Over time, many interference avoidance techniques have been proposed following this paradigm. Recently, research advances at the physical layer are allowing us to explore a new direction in interference management. The new direction is to allow interference to occur and exploit the desired information from interference, rather than avoiding interference completely. This new direction allows much higher utilization of radio channel and spectrum, and opens the door for a whole new perspective on how interference should be managed in a wireless network. This article offers a timely overview of recent advances in this exciting area, with a focus on its application in wireless LAN. We envision that the deployment of these new techniques will lead to dramatic change in the wireless networking paradigm, with profound impact on the future research direction for the wireless networking community.