The purpose of the Information Theory Paper Award is to recognize exceptional publications in the field and to stimulate interest in and encourage contributions to fields of interest of the Society. The 2009 IEEE Information Theory Paper award is presented to

V.R. Cadambe , S.A. Jafar , " Interference Alignment and the Degrees of Freedom for the K User Interference Channel " , IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory , Aug. 2008

The basic premise of the ground-breaking result reported in this paper is that, in a network of K>= 2 distributed wireless nodes, each node can transmit information such that it has interference-free communication half of the time, with the other half of the time dominated by interference from other nodes. Thus, no matter how many nodes are in the wireless network, a given user gets " half the cake " achieving data rates up to half of what would be possible with no interfering nodes in the shared spectrum.

Mention is also given to the paper by

M. A. Maddah-Ali , A. S. Motahari and A. K. Khandani entitled " Communication Over MIMO X Channels: Interference Alignment, Decomposition, and Performance Analysis ", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, August 2008,

in which the first explicit interference alignment scheme was presented.