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

Wireless-Powered Communication Assisted by Two-Way Relay with Interference Alignment Underlaying Cognitive Radio Network

This study investigates the outage performance of an under-laying wireless-powered secondary system that reuses the primary users (PU) spectrum in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) network. Each secondary user (SU) harvests energy and receives information simultaneously by applying power splitting (PS) protocol. The communication between SUs is aided by a two-way (TW) decode and forward (DF) relay. We formulate a problem to design the PS ratios at SUs, the power control factor at the secondary relay, and beamforming matrices at all nodes to minimize the secondary network's outage probability. To address this problem, we propose a two-step solution. The first step establishes closedform expressions for the PS ratios at each SU and secondary relay's power control factor. Furthermore, in the second step, interference alignment (IA) is used to design proper precoding and decoding matrices for managing the interference between secondary and primary networks. We choose IA matrices based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) iterative algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate a significant decrease in the outage probability for the proposed scheme compared to the benchmark schemes, with an average reduction of more than two orders of magnitude achieved

Interference shaping constraints for underlay MIMO interference channels

In this paper, a cognitive radio (CR) scenario comprised of a secondary interference channel (IC) and a primary point-to-point link (PPL) is studied, when the former interferes the latter. In order to satisfy a given rate requirement at the PPL, typical approaches impose an interference temperature constraint (IT).When the PPL transmits multiple streams, however, the spatial structure of the interference comes into play. In such cases, we show that spatial interference shaping constraints can provide higher sum-rate performance to the IC while ensuring the required rate at the PPL. Then, we extend the interference leakage minimization algorithm (MinIL) to incorporate such constraints. An additional power control step is included in the optimization procedure to improve the sum-rate when the interference alignment (IA) problem becomes infeasible due to the additional constraint. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the spatial shaping constraint in comparison to IT when the PPL transmits multiple data streams.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Spanish Government (MICINN) under projects TEC2010-19545-C04-03 (COSIMA), CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2008-00010 (COMONSENS), and FPU Grant AP2010-2189. This research has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under the grant Ut36/15-1

Multi-cell interference management in In-band D2D communication under LTE-A network

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is an active research area. As a part of this active research area, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is largely exploited in Out-band non-cellular technologies, such as, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi network. However, it has not been fully incorporated into existing cellular networks. Interference management is the main challenge of this technology as it generates both intra and inter-cell interference resulting in severe network performance degradation. eNodeBs with high transmit power usually affects D2D user equipments (UEs) with high interference. It usually incurs severe interference to the cellular UEs and to the base station (eNB). The scenario becomes more critical in case of multi-cell environment, which is the main research focus in this paper. In order to encourage and increase frequent use of D2D communications, some changes in the network configuration are required for today’s networking scenario. Flexible multi-cell D2D communication is required to reduce the network load. Interference management techniques are necessary in parallel to make the communication smooth, efficient and effective.This paper reviews multi-cell interference in In-Band D2D communications and investigates interference mitigation techniques in scenarios where two or more similar or different devices under same eNB or from two different eNBs can be connected as a D2D pair without compromising user experience and quality of service standard. These issues cannot be guaranteed by the current applications operated on unlicensed frequency band. The research also addresses the following related issues: mode selection, resource allocation (both for cellular and D2D environment), power control (both for eNB and D2D pair), and flexible frequency allocation techniques. The research aims to look at other issues, such as, achieving high SINR, improved system capacity, better throughput and transmission rate

On the Interference Alignment Designs for Secure Multiuser MIMO Systems

In this paper, we propose two secure multiuser multiple-input multiple-output transmission approaches based on interference alignment (IA) in the presence of an eavesdropper. To deal with the information leakage to the eavesdropper as well as the interference signals from undesired transmitters (Txs) at desired receivers (Rxs), our approaches aim to design the transmit precoding and receive subspace matrices to minimize both the total inter-main-link interference and the wiretapped signals (WSs). The first proposed IA scheme focuses on aligning the WSs into proper subspaces while the second one imposes a new structure on the precoding matrices to force the WSs to zero. When the channel state information is perfectly known at all Txs, in each proposed IA scheme, the precoding matrices at Txs and the receive subspaces at Rxs or the eavesdropper are alternatively selected to minimize the cost function of an convex optimization problem for every iteration. We provide the feasible conditions and the proofs of convergence for both IA approaches. The simulation results indicate that our two IA approaches outperform the conventional IA algorithm in terms of average secrecy sum rate.Comment: Updated version, updated author list, accepted to be appear in IEICE Transaction

RF-Powered Cognitive Radio Networks: Technical Challenges and Limitations

The increasing demand for spectral and energy efficient communication networks has spurred a great interest in energy harvesting (EH) cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Such a revolutionary technology represents a paradigm shift in the development of wireless networks, as it can simultaneously enable the efficient use of the available spectrum and the exploitation of radio frequency (RF) energy in order to reduce the reliance on traditional energy sources. This is mainly triggered by the recent advancements in microelectronics that puts forward RF energy harvesting as a plausible technique in the near future. On the other hand, it is suggested that the operation of a network relying on harvested energy needs to be redesigned to allow the network to reliably function in the long term. To this end, the aim of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the recent development and the challenges regarding the operation of CRNs powered by RF energy. In addition, the potential open issues that might be considered for the future research are also discussed in this paper.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, Accepted in IEEE Communications Magazin