In recent years, there has been rapid progress on understanding Gaussian networks with multiple unicast connections, and new coding techniques have emerged. The essence of multi-source networks is how to efficiently manage interference that arises from the transmission of other sessions. Classically, interference is removed by orthogonalization (in time or frequency). This means that the rate per session drops inversely proportional to the number of sessions, suggesting that interference is a strong limiting factor in such networks. However, recently discovered interference management techniques have led to a paradigm shift that interference might not be quite as detrimental after all. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of these new coding techniques as they apply to the case of time-varying Gaussian networks with multiple unicast connections. Specifically, we review interference alignment and ergodic interference alignment for multi-source single-hop networks and interference neutralization and ergodic interference neutralization for multi-source multi-hop networks. We mainly focus on the “degrees of freedom” perspective and also discuss an approximate capacity characterization.

The fading AWGN two-user two-hop network is considered where the channel coefficients are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) according to a continuous distribution and vary over time. For a broad class of channel distributions, the ergodic sum capacity is characterized to within a constant number of bits/second/hertz, independent of the signal-to-noise ratio. The achievability follows from the analysis of an interference neutralization scheme where the relays are partitioned into M pairs, and interference is neutralized separately by each pair of relays. When M = 1, the proposed ergodic interference neutralization characterizes the ergodic sum capacity to within 4 bits/sec/Hz for i.i.d. uniform phase fading and approximately 4.7 bits/sec/Hz for i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. It is further shown that this gap can be tightened to 4 log π-4 bits/sec/Hz (approximately 2.6) for i.i.d. uniform phase fading and 4-4 log(3π/8) bits/sec/Hz (approximately 3.1) for i.i.d. Rayleigh fading in the limit of large M1.