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

Overhead-Aware Distributed CSI Selection in the MIMO Interference Channel

We consider a MIMO interference channel in which the transmitters and receivers operate in frequency-division duplex mode. In this setting, interference management through coordinated transceiver design necessitates channel state information at the transmitters (CSI-T). The acquisition of CSI-T is done through feedback from the receivers, which entitles a loss in degrees of freedom, due to training and feedback. This loss increases with the amount of CSI-T. In this work, after formulating an overhead model for CSI acquisition at the transmitters, we propose a distributed mechanism to find for each transmitter a subset of the complete CSI, which is used to perform interference management. The mechanism is based on many-to-many stable matching. We prove the existence of a stable matching and exploit an algorithm to reach it. Simulation results show performance improvement compared to full and minimal CSI-T.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. to appear at EUSIPCO 2015, Special Session on Algorithms for Distributed Coordination and Learnin

Interference Alignment-Aided Base Station Clustering using Coalition Formation

Base station clustering is necessary in large interference networks, where the channel state information (CSI) acquisition overhead otherwise would be overwhelming. In this paper, we propose a novel long-term throughput model for the clustered users which addresses the balance between interference mitigation capability and CSI acquisition overhead. The model only depends on statistical CSI, thus enabling long-term clustering. Based on notions from coalitional game theory, we propose a low-complexity distributed clustering method. The algorithm converges in a couple of iterations, and only requires limited communication between base stations. Numerical simulations show the viability of the proposed approach.Comment: 2nd Prize, Student Paper Contest. Copyright 2015 SS&C. Published in the Proceedings of the 49th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, Nov 8-11, 2015, Pacific Grove, CA, US

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

Degrees of Freedom of Time Correlated MISO Broadcast Channel with Delayed CSIT

We consider the time correlated multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast channel where the transmitter has imperfect knowledge on the current channel state, in addition to delayed channel state information. By representing the quality of the current channel state information as P^-{\alpha} for the signal-to-noise ratio P and some constant {\alpha} \geq 0, we characterize the optimal degree of freedom region for this more general two-user MISO broadcast correlated channel. The essential ingredients of the proposed scheme lie in the quantization and multicasting of the overheard interferences, while broadcasting new private messages. Our proposed scheme smoothly bridges between the scheme recently proposed by Maddah-Ali and Tse with no current state information and a simple zero-forcing beamforming with perfect current state information.Comment: revised and final version, to appear in IEEE transactions on Information Theor

Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication