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

Degrees of Freedom of Two-Hop Wireless Networks: "Everyone Gets the Entire Cake"

We show that fully connected two-hop wireless networks with K sources, K relays and K destinations have K degrees of freedom both in the case of time-varying channel coefficients and in the case of constant channel coefficients (in which case the result holds for almost all values of constant channel coefficients). Our main contribution is a new achievability scheme which we call Aligned Network Diagonalization. This scheme allows the data streams transmitted by the sources to undergo a diagonal linear transformation from the sources to the destinations, thus being received free of interference by their intended destination. In addition, we extend our scheme to multi-hop networks with fully connected hops, and multi-hop networks with MIMO nodes, for which the degrees of freedom are also fully characterized.Comment: Presented at the 2012 Allerton Conference. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

Downlink Noncoherent Cooperation without Transmitter Phase Alignment

Multicell joint processing can mitigate inter-cell interference and thereby increase the spectral efficiency of cellular systems. Most previous work has assumed phase-aligned (coherent) transmissions from different base transceiver stations (BTSs), which is difficult to achieve in practice. In this work, a noncoherent cooperative transmission scheme for the downlink is studied, which does not require phase alignment. The focus is on jointly serving two users in adjacent cells sharing the same resource block. The two BTSs partially share their messages through a backhaul link, and each BTS transmits a superposition of two codewords, one for each receiver. Each receiver decodes its own message, and treats the signals for the other receiver as background noise. With narrowband transmissions the achievable rate region and maximum achievable weighted sum rate are characterized by optimizing the power allocation (and the beamforming vectors in the case of multiple transmit antennas) at each BTS between its two codewords. For a wideband (multicarrier) system, a dual formulation of the optimal power allocation problem across sub-carriers is presented, which can be efficiently solved by numerical methods. Results show that the proposed cooperation scheme can improve the sum rate substantially in the low to moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication