Interference alignment promises that, in Gaussian interference channels, each
link can support half of a degree of freedom (DoF) per pair of transmit-receive
antennas. However, in general, this result requires to precode the data bearing
signals over a signal space of asymptotically large diversity, e.g., over an
infinite number of dimensions for time-frequency varying fading channels, or
over an infinite number of rationally independent signal levels, in the case of
time-frequency invariant channels. In this work we consider a wireless cellular
system scenario where the promised optimal DoFs are achieved with linear
precoding in one-shot (i.e., over a single time-frequency slot). We focus on
the uplink of a symmetric cellular system, where each cell is split into three
sectors with orthogonal intra-sector multiple access. In our model,
interference is "local", i.e., it is due to transmitters in neighboring cells
only. We consider a message-passing backhaul network architecture, in which
nearby sectors can exchange already decoded messages and propose an alignment
solution that can achieve the optimal DoFs. To avoid signaling schemes relying
on the strength of interference, we further introduce the notion of
\emph{topologically robust} schemes, which are able to guarantee a minimum rate
(or DoFs) irrespectively of the strength of the interfering links. Towards this
end, we design an alignment scheme which is topologically robust and still
achieves the same optimum DoFs