Traditionally, feedback has been mainly used in communication systems for retransmission and for channel prediction. Several recent results in network information theory have identified a new role for feedback: exploiting side information to mitigate interference. Due to the broadcast nature of communication media, information intended for one user is often received by other users. Feedback can be used to exploit this side information to improve the efficiency of future transmissions. The proposed work builds upon these results to come up with a theory unifying the existing isolated results as well as broadening to more scenarios of interest. It will also identify specific problems to solve for realizing this new role of feedback in practice. The goal is to close the gap between feedback research in information theory and the design of feedback mechanisms in practice.
