EECS Seminar: Cellular Networks and Treating Inter-cell Interference as Noise

Abstract: Cellular networks are the primary enabler for wireless and mobile services, and an essential part of infrastructure for modern day society. Despite their pervasiveness, and against extensive research and progress, information-theoretic capacity limits of cellular networks remain largely unknown. Understanding capacity limits is essential for the evolution of cellular technology, as they constitute fundamental benchmarks for evaluating currently deployed protocols and can provide insights into the design of more efficient schemes.

In this talk, I will start by reviewing basic concepts related to the information theory of wireless networks in general, and cellular networks in particular. I will emphasize the role of asymptotic analysis and approximations in gaining insights into capacity and the structure of optimal interference management schemes. I will then focus on cellular networks with weak inter-cell interference. This is motivated by the fact that in practice, each user in a cellular network connects to the base station with the strongest signal within its vicinity, which naturally places cellular networks in the weak inter-cell interference regime. I will present a number of recent results on the information-theoretic optimality of treating inter-cell interference as noise under weak inter-cell interference. Finally, I will conclude the talk by discussing a few open problems.

Bio: Hamdi Joudeh is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. He received his doctorate in electrical engineering and master's degree in communications and signal processing from Imperial College London, UK, in 2016 and 2011 respectively. He was a research associate in the Communications and Information Theory Group at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany (2019-2020), and the Communications and Signal Processing Group at Imperial College London (2016-2019). His research interests are in information theory and wireless communications.

Host: Syed Jafar