Introduction to the issue on signal processing for exploiting interference toward energy efficient and secure wireless communications

INTERFERENCE has been the central focus for meeting the ever increasing requirements on quality of service in modern and future wireless communication systems, and has long been considered as a deleterious factor that limits the system capacity. In conventional communications systems, the design objective is to allow users to share a medium with minimum or no interference. Thus, great efforts are made to avoid, mitigate, and cancel interference. For instance, to support multiple users, orthogonal access methods in time, frequency, code well as spatial domains have been used in different generations of cellular systems. In future-generation heterogeneous cellular networks, due to the increasing number of uncoordinated lowpower nodes such as femtocells to improve the coverage and pacity, interferences need to be mitigated in multiple domains, rendering their management a challenge. Interference mitigation/avoidance techniques provide convenient mechanisms allow multiple users to share the wireless medium. However, they lead to inefficient use of wireless resources.