Wrestling with interference in information and communication processing (WINTER)

Current societal prospects in the ICT arena advance a sustained demand for faster and more dependable wireless communications designed under the paradigm of enhanced energy efficiency. More challenges yet lie ahead: swiftest connectivity, resilience or complexity are but a few. WINTER will strive for operative solutions to some of them. A salient feature in next generation networks (5G) will be their ability to handle the interference resulting from a large population of heterogeneous terminals with varying requirements, while preserving relevant performance figures.In this way, interference management becomes indispensable, a challenge that can be addressed through different fronts:

•  In view of spectrum scarcity, the goals of reducing interference to other terminals and improving spectral efficiency have a direct impact on network operation costs. Hence, it is imperative to advance toward adaptive, flexible, and efficient radio access technologies. This fact stimulates research on waveform enhancements as one prevailing facet at the physical layer of wireless communications. Two tasks will address this issue: (i) multicarrier waveforms for minimizing out-of-band radiation in terms of spectral precoding; (ii) efficient waveforms that learn from the environment and transmit opportunistically causing no (or little) interference to other users.
• Medium access constitutes another source of interference in scenarios with a large number of users, for which the reduction or elimination of network coordination functions is a necessity.  The management of massive multiple access interference according to performance figures such as energy efficiency or user latency will be investigated under the scope of interference cancellation.  At the terminal level, self-interference cancellation will contribute to full-duplex communications, by which simultaneous in-band transmission and reception are possible. This functionality will allow to double spectral efficiency and to significantly simplify spectrum management.
• The deployment of large-scale networks of low-cost devices integrating sensors and actuators capable of computation and communication presents another challenge in terms of robustness and security. These systems are prone to malicious attacks by external agents with the ensuing damage and performance loss to legitimate users. Hence, it is important to advance our understanding of these vulnerabilities to prevent, detect, and react to potential adversarial actions. WINTER will contribute to improve the performance and security of these systems. Robust schemes for parameter estimation, data, event or outlier detection as well as combinations thereof is a relevant factor for information processing in current and future device networks. These aspects will also be addressed from a blend of information theoretic with signal processing schemes.