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

Opportunistic Interference Alignment in MIMO Interference Channels

We present two interference alignment techniques such that an opportunistic point-to-point multiple input multiple output (MIMO) link can reuse, without generating any additional interference, the same frequency band of a similar pre-existing primary link. In this scenario, we exploit the fact that under power constraints, although each radio maximizes independently its rate by water-filling on their channel transfer matrix singular values, frequently, not all of them are used. Therefore, by aligning the interference of the opportunistic radio it is possible to transmit at a significant rate while insuring zero-interference on the pre-existing link. We propose a linear pre-coder for a perfect interference alignment and a power allocation scheme which maximizes the individual data rate of the secondary link. Our numerical results show that significant data rates are achieved even for a reduced number of antennas.Comment: To appear in proc. IEEE PIMRC 2008 - Workshop in Emerging Network Perspectives in Multiuser and Cooperative MIMO (NWMIMO). 5 pages and 4 figure