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

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

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