Aligned Interference Neutralization and the Degrees of Freedom of the 2\,\times \,2\,\times \,2 Interference Channel.

We show that the 2\,\times \,2\,\times \,2 interference network, i.e., the multihop interference network formed by concatenation of two two-user interference channels achieves the min-cut outer bound value of 2 DoF, for almost all values of channel coefficients, for both time-varying or fixed-channel coefficients. The key to this result is a new idea, called aligned interference neutralization, that provides a way to align interference terms over each hop in a manner that allows them to be canceled over the air at the last hop. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]