Abstract

While much recent progress on interference networks has come about under the assumption of abundant channel state information at the transmitters (CSIT), a complementary perspective is sought in this work through the study of interference networks with no CSIT except a coarse knowledge of the topology of the network that only allows a distinction between weak and significant channels and no further knowledge of the channel coefficients ’ realizations. Modeled as a degrees-of-freedom (DoF) study of a partially connected interference network with no CSIT, the problem is found to have a counterpart in the capacity analysis of wired networks with arbitrary linear network coding at intermediate nodes, under the assumption that the sources are aware only of the end to end topology of the network. The wireless (wired) network DoF (capacity) region, expressed in dimensionless units as a multiple of the DoF (capacity) of a single point to point channel (link), is found to be bounded above by the capacity of an index coding problem where the antidotes graph is the complement of the interference graph of the original network and the bottleneck link capacity is normalized to unity. The problems are shown to be equivalent under linear solutions over the same field. An interference alignment