Feasibility Conditions of Interference Alignment via Two Orthogonal Subcarriers

Conditions are derived on line-of-sight channels to ensure the feasibility of interference alignment. The conditions involve choosing only the spacing between two subcarriers of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme. The maximal degrees-of-freedom are achieved and even an upper bound on the sum-rate of interference alignment is approached arbitrarily closely.Comment: Submitted to ISIT 201

Ergodic Interference Alignment

This paper develops a new communication strategy, ergodic interference alignment, for the K-user interference channel with time-varying fading. At any particular time, each receiver will see a superposition of the transmitted signals plus noise. The standard approach to such a scenario results in each transmitter-receiver pair achieving a rate proportional to 1/K its interference-free ergodic capacity. However, given two well-chosen time indices, the channel coefficients from interfering users can be made to exactly cancel. By adding up these two observations, each receiver can obtain its desired signal without any interference. If the channel gains have independent, uniform phases, this technique allows each user to achieve at least 1/2 its interference-free ergodic capacity at any signal-to-noise ratio. Prior interference alignment techniques were only able to attain this performance as the signal-to-noise ratio tended to infinity. Extensions are given for the case where each receiver wants a message from more than one transmitter as well as the "X channel" case (with two receivers) where each transmitter has an independent message for each receiver. Finally, it is shown how to generalize this strategy beyond Gaussian channel models. For a class of finite field interference channels, this approach yields the ergodic capacity region.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

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

Downlink Cellular Interference Alignment

Cellular networks have been notoriously interference-limited systems in dense urban areas, where base stations are deployed in close proximity to one-another. Recently, a signal processing method called Interference Alignment has emerged, making use of the increasing signal dimensions available in the system through multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technologies. In this report, we review the state of the art of interference alignment since its foundation, and we detail algorithms and baseline comparisons to make when applying interference alignment schemes to downlink cellular networks. We also propose a number of research directions of interest which are not yet answered in the current literature.Les réseaux cellulaires ont été l'exemple typique de réseaux dont les performances sont limités par les interférences, particulièrement dans les régions urbaines. Récemment, une nouvelle technique de traitement du signal appelée "alignement d'interférences" a été dévelopée, et permet d'utiliser les dimensions du signal reçu à travers les technologies MIMO (multiple input multiple output) et OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) pour annuler tout ou partie de l'interférence reçue par les mobiles. Dans ce rapport, nous évaluons la littérature liée à l'alignement d'interférence et nous détaillons les algorithmes existants et leur application aux réseaux cellulaires en voie descendante. Nous proposons ensuite un ensemble de directions de recherche d'intérêt par rapport à l'état de l'art actuel

Relay-aided Interference Alignment in Wireless Networks

Resource management in wireless networks is one of the key factors in maximizing the overall throughput. Contrary to popular belief, dividing the resources in a dense network does not yield the best results. A method that has been developed recently shares the spectrum amongst all the users in such a way that each node can potentially utilize about half of all the available resources. This new technique is often referred to as Interference Alignment and excels based on the fact that the amount of the network resources assigned to a user does not go to zero as the number of users in the network increases. Unfortunately it is still very difficult to implement the interference alignment concepts in practice. This thesis investigates some of the low-complexity solutions to integrate interference alignment ideas into the existing wireless networks. In the third and fourth chapters of this thesis, it is shown that introducing relays to a quasi-static wireless network can be very beneficial in terms of achieving higher degrees of freedom. The relays store the signals being communicated in the network and then send a linear combination of those signals. Using the proposed scheme, it is shown that although the relays cannot decode the original information, they can transform the equivalent channel in such a way that performing interference alignment becomes much easier. Investigating the required output power of the relays shows that it can scale either slower or faster than the output power of the main transmitters. This opens new doors for the applications that have constraints on the accessible output powers in the network nodes. The results are valid for both $X$ Channel and Interference Channel network topologies. In Chapter Five, the similarities between full-duplex transmitters and relays are examined. The results suggest that the transmitters can play the relay roles for offering easier interference alignment. Similar to the relay-based alignment, in the presented scheme full-duplex transmitters listen to the signals from other transmitters and use this information during the subsequent transmission periods. Studying the functionality of the full-duplex transmitters from the receivers' side shows the benefits of having a minimal cooperation between transmitters without even being able to decode the signals. It is also proved that the degrees of freedom for the $N$-user Interference Channel with full-duplex transmitters can be $\sqrt{\frac{N}{2}}$. The results offer an easy way to recover a portion of degrees of freedom with manageable complexity suited for practical systems

Communication over Asynchronous Networks: Signaling and Rate-Reliability Analysis

Asynchronism inherently exists in many communication systems specially in multi-terminal networks mainly due to the effect of multi-path and propagation delay. While in theoretical analysis of communication systems perfect synchronization of the terminals is often presumed, in some cases in which the nodes are randomly distributed over a geometrical area, it might be impossible to synchronize the nodes even if an ideal infrastructure service provider is used. In this work, two major categories of multi-user communication systems, i.e., relay networks and interference channels, are considered and the effect of the asynchronism among the terminals on characteristic properties of these channels are investigated. In Chapter 2, the construction of distributed space-time codes for a general two-hop asynchronous cooperative relay network is considered. A novel algebraic structure is proposed and shown to achieve full diversity for arbitrary number of relays, arbitrary input alphabets, and arbitrary delay profiles among the relays. Unlike previously proposed delay tolerant schemes, the new design has minimum length which translates into smaller decoding complexity at the same transmission rate. Full-rate and full-diversity are achieved by the new designs with or without the use of guard intervals between successive transmissions. Simulation results confirm the mathematical analysis of the proposed codes. In Chapter 3, the underlying asynchronous network is examined for various relaying protocols such as non-orthogonal selection decode-and-forward, orthogonal selection decode-and-forward, non-orthogonal amplify-and-forward (NAF), and orthogonal amplify-and-forward (OAF). The transmitter nodes send pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) signals, in which information symbols are linearly modulated by a shaping waveform to be sent to the destination, asynchronously. We consider two different cases with respect to the type of the shaping waveforms used in the structure of the PAM signals. In the theoretical case where band-limited shaping waveforms are used, it is shown that the asynchronism does not affect the DMT performance of the system and the same DMT as that of the corresponding synchronous network is obtained for all the aforementioned protocols. In the practical case where time-limited shaping waveforms are used, it is shown that better diversity gains can be achieved at the expense of a bandwidth expansion. More precisely, in the decode-and-forward type protocols, the asynchronous network provides a better diversity gain than that of the corresponding synchronous network throughout the range of the multiplexing gain. In the amplify-and-forward type protocols, the asynchronous network provides the same DMT as that of the corresponding synchronous counterpart under the OAF protocol; however, a better diversity gain is achieved under the NAF protocol throughout the range of the multiplexing gain. In particular, in the single relay asynchronous network, the NAF protocol provides the same DMT as that of the 2 × 1 multiple-input single-output channel. In Chapter 4, a constant K-user interference channel in which the users are not symbol synchronous is considered. It is shown that the asynchronism among the users does not affect the total number of degrees of freedom (DOF) of this channel; however, it facilitates aligning interfering signals at each receiver node. To achieve the total K/2 DOF of this channel when single antenna nodes are used, a novel practical interference alignment scheme is proposed wherein the alignment task is performed with the help of asynchronous delays which inherently exist among the received signals at each receiver node. The asynchronism causes inter-symbol-interference (ISI) among transmitted symbols by different transmitters resulting in the underlying quasi-static links to be converted to ISI and accordingly into time varying channels. It is proved that this conversion solves the lack of channel variation required for the interference alignment in quasi-static scenarios. When each node is equipped with M > 1 antennas, it is argued that the same alignment scheme proposed for the single antenna nodes’ interference channel is sufficient to achieve the total MK/2 DOF of the medium provided that each pair of the transmitters and the receivers experience the same asynchronous delay for all the corresponding antennas. In contrast to previously proposed alignment schemes, the channel state information of the links does not need to be known at the transmitter nodes. Instead, the relative delays among the received signals at each receiver node are globally known to the entire network. While the asynchronism is usually treated as a troublesome factor in communication systems, in this dissertation, we are interested to introduce it as a useful property of the wireless medium similar to the fading which can improve the system performance in some communication scenarios or facilitate signaling over the medium in some other scenarios