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

Cooperative Feedback for Multi-Antenna Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive beamforming (CB) is a multi-antenna technique for efficient spectrum sharing between primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) in a cognitive radio network. Specifically, a multi-antenna SU transmitter applies CB to suppress the interference to the PU receivers as well as enhance the corresponding SU-link performance. In this paper, for a multiple-input-single-output (MISO) SU channel coexisting with a single-input-single-output (SISO) PU channel, we propose a new and practical paradigm for designing CB based on the finite-rate cooperative feedback from the PU receiver to the SU transmitter. Specifically, the PU receiver communicates to the SU transmitter the quantized SU-to-PU channel direction information (CDI) for computing the SU transmit beamformer, and the interference power control (IPC) signal that regulates the SU transmission power according to the tolerable interference margin at the PU receiver. Two CB algorithms based on cooperative feedback are proposed: one restricts the SU transmit beamformer to be orthogonal to the quantized SU-to-PU channel direction and the other relaxes such a constraint. In addition, cooperative feedforward of the SU CDI from the SU transmitter to the PU receiver is exploited to allow more efficient cooperative feedback. The outage probabilities of the SU link for different CB and cooperative feedback/feedforward algorithms are analyzed, from which the optimal bit-allocation tradeoff between the CDI and IPC feedback is characterized.Comment: 26 pages; to appear in IEEE Trans. Signal Processin