Limited Feedback Design for Interference Alignment on MIMO Interference Networks with Heterogeneous Path Loss and Spatial Correlations

Interference alignment is degree of freedom optimal in K -user MIMO interference channels and many previous works have studied the transceiver designs. However, these works predominantly focus on networks with perfect channel state information at the transmitters and symmetrical interference topology. In this paper, we consider a limited feedback system with heterogeneous path loss and spatial correlations, and investigate how the dynamics of the interference topology can be exploited to improve the feedback efficiency. We propose a novel spatial codebook design, and perform dynamic quantization via bit allocations to adapt to the asymmetry of the interference topology. We bound the system throughput under the proposed dynamic scheme in terms of the transmit SNR, feedback bits and the interference topology parameters. It is shown that when the number of feedback bits scales with SNR as C_{s}\cdot\log\textrm{SNR}, the sum degrees of freedom of the network are preserved. Moreover, the value of scaling coefficient C_{s} can be significantly reduced in networks with asymmetric interference topology.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, accepted by IEEE transactions on signal processing in Feb. 201

Degrees of Freedom of Certain Interference Alignment Schemes with Distributed CSIT

In this work, we consider the use of interference alignment (IA) in a MIMO interference channel (IC) under the assumption that each transmitter (TX) has access to channel state information (CSI) that generally differs from that available to other TXs. This setting is referred to as distributed CSIT. In a setting where CSI accuracy is controlled by a set of power exponents, we show that in the static 3-user MIMO square IC, the number of degrees-of-freedom (DoF) that can be achieved with distributed CSIT is at least equal to the DoF achieved with the worst accuracy taken across the TXs and across the interfering links. We conjecture further that this represents exactly the DoF achieved. This result is in strong contrast with the centralized CSIT configuration usually studied (where all the TXs share the same, possibly imperfect, channel estimate) for which it was shown that the DoF achieved at receiver (RX) i is solely limited by the quality of its own feedback. This shows the critical impact of CSI discrepancies between the TXs, and highlights the price paid by distributed precoding.Comment: This is an extended version of a conference submission which will be presented at the IEEE conference SPAWC, Darmstadt, June 201

The Practical Challenges of Interference Alignment

Interference alignment (IA) is a revolutionary wireless transmission strategy that reduces the impact of interference. The idea of interference alignment is to coordinate multiple transmitters so that their mutual interference aligns at the receivers, facilitating simple interference cancellation techniques. Since IA's inception, researchers have investigated its performance and proposed improvements, verifying IA's ability to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom (an approximation of sum capacity) in a variety of settings, developing algorithms for determining alignment solutions, and generalizing transmission strategies that relax the need for perfect alignment but yield better performance. This article provides an overview of the concept of interference alignment as well as an assessment of practical issues including performance in realistic propagation environments, the role of channel state information at the transmitter, and the practicality of interference alignment in large networks.Comment: submitted to IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin

CSI Feedback Reduction for MIMO Interference Alignment

Interference alignment (IA) is a linear precoding strategy that can achieve optimal capacity scaling at high SNR in interference networks. Most of the existing IA designs require full channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters, which induces a huge CSI signaling cost. Hence it is desirable to improve the feedback efficiency for IA and in this paper, we propose a novel IA scheme with a significantly reduced CSI feedback. To quantify the CSI feedback cost, we introduce a novel metric, namely the feedback dimension. This metric serves as a first-order measurement of CSI feedback overhead. Due to the partial CSI feedback constraint, conventional IA schemes can not be applied and hence, we develop a novel IA precoder / decorrelator design and establish new IA feasibility conditions. Via dynamic feedback profile design, the proposed IA scheme can also achieve a flexible tradeoff between the degree of freedom (DoF) requirements for data streams, the antenna resources and the CSI feedback cost. We show by analysis and simulations that the proposed scheme achieves substantial reductions of CSI feedback overhead under the same DoF requirement in MIMO interference networks.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication by IEEE transactions on signal processing in June, 201

Cooperative Precoding with Limited Feedback for MIMO Interference Channels

Multi-antenna precoding effectively mitigates the interference in wireless networks. However, the resultant performance gains can be significantly compromised in practice if the precoder design fails to account for the inaccuracy in the channel state information (CSI) feedback. This paper addresses this issue by considering finite-rate CSI feedback from receivers to their interfering transmitters in the two-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel, called cooperative feedback, and proposing a systematic method for designing transceivers comprising linear precoders and equalizers. Specifically, each precoder/equalizer is decomposed into inner and outer components for nulling the cross-link interference and achieving array gain, respectively. The inner precoders/equalizers are further optimized to suppress the residual interference resulting from finite-rate cooperative feedback. Further- more, the residual interference is regulated by additional scalar cooperative feedback signals that are designed to control transmission power using different criteria including fixed interference margin and maximum sum throughput. Finally, the required number of cooperative precoder feedback bits is derived for limiting the throughput loss due to precoder quantization.Comment: 23 pages; 5 figures; this work was presented in part at Asilomar 2011 and will appear in IEEE Trans. on Wireless Com

Interference Alignment (IA) and Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) with IEEE802.11ac feedback compression: testbed results

We have implemented interference alignment (IA) and joint transmission coordinated multipoint (CoMP) on a wireless testbed using the feedback compression scheme of the new 802.11ac standard. The performance as a function of the frequency domain granularity is assessed. Realistic throughput gains are obtained by probing each spatial modulation stream with ten different coding and modulation schemes. The gain of IA and CoMP over TDMA MIMO is found to be 26% and 71%, respectively under stationary conditions. In our dense indoor office deployment, the frequency domain granularity of the feedback can be reduced down to every 8th subcarrier (2.5MHz), without sacrificing performance.Comment: To appear in ICASSP 201