Enabling the Multi-User Generalized Degrees of Freedom in the Gaussian Cellular Channel

There has been major progress over the last decade in understanding the classical interference channel (IC). Recent key results show that constant bit gap capacity results can be obtained from linear deterministic models (LDMs). However, it is widely unrecognized that the time-invariant, frequency-flat cellular channel, which contains the IC as a special case, possesses some additional generalized degrees of freedom (GDoF) due to multi-user operation. This was proved for the LDM cellular channel very recently but is an open question for the corresponding Gaussian counterpart. In this paper, we close this gap and provide an achievable sum-rate for the Gaussian cellular channel which is within a constant bit gap of the LDM sum capacity. We show that the additional GDoFs from the LDM cellular channel carry over. This is enabled by signal scale alignment. In particular, the multi-user gain reduces the interference by half in the 2-user per cell case compared to the IC.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in IEEE ITW 2014, Hobart, Australi

Exploiting Spatial Interference Alignment and Opportunistic Scheduling in the Downlink of Interference Limited Systems

In this paper we analyze the performance of single stream and multi-stream spatial multiplexing (SM) systems employing opportunistic scheduling in the presence of interference. In the proposed downlink framework, every active user reports the post-processing signal-to-interference-plus-noise-power-ratio (post-SINR) or the receiver specific mutual information (MI) to its own transmitter using a feedback channel. The combination of scheduling and multi-antenna receiver processing leads to substantial interference suppression gain. Specifically, we show that opportunistic scheduling exploits spatial interference alignment (SIA) property inherent to a multi-user system for effective interference mitigation. We obtain bounds for the outage probability and the sum outage capacity for single stream and multi stream SM employing real or complex encoding for a symmetric interference channel model. The techniques considered in this paper are optimal in different operating regimes. We show that the sum outage capacity can be maximized by reducing the SM rate to a value less than the maximum allowed value. The optimum SM rate depends on the number of interferers and the number of available active users. In particular, we show that the generalized multi-user SM (MU SM) method employing real-valued encoding provides a performance that is either comparable, or significantly higher than that of MU SM employing complex encoding. A combination of analysis and simulation is used to describe the trade-off between the multiplexing rate and sum outage capacity for different antenna configurations

Fundamental Limits of Cooperation

Cooperation is viewed as a key ingredient for interference management in wireless systems. This paper shows that cooperation has fundamental limitations. The main result is that even full cooperation between transmitters cannot in general change an interference-limited network to a noise-limited network. The key idea is that there exists a spectral efficiency upper bound that is independent of the transmit power. First, a spectral efficiency upper bound is established for systems that rely on pilot-assisted channel estimation; in this framework, cooperation is shown to be possible only within clusters of limited size, which are subject to out-of-cluster interference whose power scales with that of the in-cluster signals. Second, an upper bound is also shown to exist when cooperation is through noncoherent communication; thus, the spectral efficiency limitation is not a by-product of the reliance on pilot-assisted channel estimation. Consequently, existing literature that routinely assumes the high-power spectral efficiency scales with the log of the transmit power provides only a partial characterization. The complete characterization proposed in this paper subdivides the high-power regime into a degrees-of-freedom regime, where the scaling with the log of the transmit power holds approximately, and a saturation regime, where the spectral efficiency hits a ceiling that is independent of the power. Using a cellular system as an example, it is demonstrated that the spectral efficiency saturates at power levels of operational relevance.Comment: 27 page