Interference Alignment for Cognitive Radio Communications and Networks: A Survey

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Interference alignment (IA) is an innovative wireless transmission strategy that has shown to be a promising technique for achieving optimal capacity scaling of a multiuser interference channel at asymptotically high-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Transmitters exploit the availability of multiple signaling dimensions in order to align their mutual interference at the receivers. Most of the research has focused on developing algorithms for determining alignment solutions as well as proving interference alignment’s theoretical ability to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom in a wireless network. Cognitive radio, on the other hand, is a technique used to improve the utilization of the radio spectrum by opportunistically sensing and accessing unused licensed frequency spectrum, without causing harmful interference to the licensed users. With the increased deployment of wireless services, the possibility of detecting unused frequency spectrum becomes diminished. Thus, the concept of introducing interference alignment in cognitive radio has become a very attractive proposition. This paper provides a survey of the implementation of IA in cognitive radio under the main research paradigms, along with a summary and analysis of results under each system model.Peer reviewe

Degrees of Freedom and Achievable Rate of Wide-Band Multi-cell Multiple Access Channels With No CSIT

This paper considers a $K$-cell multiple access channel with inter-symbol interference. The primary finding of this paper is that, without instantaneous channel state information at the transmitters (CSIT), the sum degrees-of-freedom (DoF) of the considered channel is $\frac{\beta -1}{\beta}K$ with $\beta \geq 2$ when the number of users per cell is sufficiently large, where $\beta$ is the ratio of the maximum channel-impulse-response (CIR) length of desired links to that of interfering links in each cell. Our finding implies that even without instantaneous CSIT, \textit{interference-free DoF per cell} is achievable as $\beta$ approaches infinity with a sufficiently large number of users per cell. This achievability is shown by a blind interference management method that exploits the relativity in delay spreads between desired and interfering links. In this method, all inter-cell-interference signals are aligned to the same direction by using a discrete-Fourier-transform-based precoding with cyclic prefix that only depends on the number of CIR taps. Using this method, we also characterize the achievable sum rate of the considered channel, in a closed-form expression.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing

The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated access points. In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin

A High-Diversity Transceiver Design for MISO Broadcast Channels

In this paper, the outage behavior and diversity order of the mixture transceiver architecture for multiple-input single-output broadcast channels are analyzed. The mixture scheme groups users with closely-aligned channels and applies superposition coding and successive interference cancellation decoding to each group composed of users with closely-aligned channels, while applying zero-forcing beamforming across semi-orthogonal user groups. In order to enable such analysis, closed-form lower bounds on the achievable rates of a general multiple-input single-output broadcast channel with superposition coding and successive interference cancellation are newly derived. By employing channel-adaptive user grouping and proper power allocation, which ensures that the channel subspaces of user groups have angle larger than a certain threshold, it is shown that the mixture transceiver architecture achieves full diversity order in multiple-input single-output broadcast channels and opportunistically increases the multiplexing gain while achieving full diversity order. Furthermore, the achieved full diversity order is the same as that of the single-user maximum ratio transmit beamforming. Hence, the mixture scheme can provide reliable communication under channel fading for ultra-reliable low latency communication. Numerical results validate our analysis and show the outage superiority of the mixture scheme over conventional transceiver designs for multiple-input single-output broadcast channels.Comment: The inner region is evaluated. The single-group SIC performance is evaluate