This paper develops a new communication strategy, ergodic interference
alignment, for the K-user interference channel with time-varying fading. At any
particular time, each receiver will see a superposition of the transmitted
signals plus noise. The standard approach to such a scenario results in each
transmitter-receiver pair achieving a rate proportional to 1/K its
interference-free ergodic capacity. However, given two well-chosen time
indices, the channel coefficients from interfering users can be made to exactly
cancel. By adding up these two observations, each receiver can obtain its
desired signal without any interference. If the channel gains have independent,
uniform phases, this technique allows each user to achieve at least 1/2 its
interference-free ergodic capacity at any signal-to-noise ratio. Prior
interference alignment techniques were only able to attain this performance as
the signal-to-noise ratio tended to infinity. Extensions are given for the case
where each receiver wants a message from more than one transmitter as well as
the "X channel" case (with two receivers) where each transmitter has an
independent message for each receiver. Finally, it is shown how to generalize
this strategy beyond Gaussian channel models. For a class of finite field
interference channels, this approach yields the ergodic capacity region.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information
Theor