Interference (communication)

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Disruptive modification of a signal

title: "Interference (communication)" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["noise-(electronics)", "interference", "telecommunications"] description: "Disruptive modification of a signal" topic_path: "engineering" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_(communication)" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Disruptive modification of a signal ::

In telecommunications, an interference is that which modifies a signal in a disruptive manner, as it travels along a communication channel between its source and receiver. The term is often used to refer to the addition of unwanted signals to a useful signal. Common examples include:

Electromagnetic interference (EMI)
Co-channel interference (CCI), also known as crosstalk
Adjacent-channel interference (ACI)
Intersymbol interference (ISI)
Inter-carrier interference (ICI), caused by doppler shift in OFDM modulation (multitone modulation).
Common-mode interference (CMI)
Conducted interference

Noise is a form of interference but not all interference is noise.

Radio resource management aims at reducing and controlling the co-channel and adjacent-channel interference.

Interference alignment

A solution to interference problems in wireless communication networks is interference alignment, which was crystallized by Syed Ali Jafar at the University of California, Irvine. A specialized application was previously studied by Yitzhak Birk and Tomer Kol for an index coding problem in 1998. For interference management in wireless communication, interference alignment was originally introduced by Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Abolfazl S. Motahari, and Amir Keyvan Khandani, at the University of Waterloo, for communication over wireless X channels. Interference alignment was eventually established as a general principle by Jafar and Viveck R. Cadambe in 2008, when they introduced "a mechanism to align an arbitrarily large number of interferers, leading to the surprising conclusion that wireless networks are not essentially interference limited." This led to the adoption of interference alignment in the design of wireless networks.

Jafar explained:

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According to New York University senior researcher Paul Horn:

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References

(June 30, 2015). "2015 National Laureates". [[Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists]].
(July 2008). ["Communication over MIMO X channels: Interference alignment, decomposition, and performance analysis"](https://www.academia.edu/download/47687606/Communication_Over_MIMO_X_Channels_Inter20160801-28172-jqjoq1.pdf}}{{dead link). IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
(2010). "Interference Alignment — A New Look at Signal Dimensions in a Communication Network". Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory.
(August 24, 2015). "Meet the Scientists: Syed A. Jafar". [[United States Department of Defense]].

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