Ergodic Interference Alignment

This paper develops a new communication strategy, ergodic interference alignment, for the K-user interference channel with time-varying fading. At any particular time, each receiver will see a superposition of the transmitted signals plus noise. The standard approach to such a scenario results in each transmitter-receiver pair achieving a rate proportional to 1/K its interference-free ergodic capacity. However, given two well-chosen time indices, the channel coefficients from interfering users can be made to exactly cancel. By adding up these two observations, each receiver can obtain its desired signal without any interference. If the channel gains have independent, uniform phases, this technique allows each user to achieve at least 1/2 its interference-free ergodic capacity at any signal-to-noise ratio. Prior interference alignment techniques were only able to attain this performance as the signal-to-noise ratio tended to infinity. Extensions are given for the case where each receiver wants a message from more than one transmitter as well as the "X channel" case (with two receivers) where each transmitter has an independent message for each receiver. Finally, it is shown how to generalize this strategy beyond Gaussian channel models. For a class of finite field interference channels, this approach yields the ergodic capacity region.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Advanced Quantizer Designs for FDD-Based FD-MIMO Systems Using Uniform Planar Arrays

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which utilize a large number of antennas at the base station, are expected to enhance network throughput by enabling improved multiuser MIMO techniques. To deploy many antennas in reasonable form factors, base stations are expected to employ antenna arrays in both horizontal and vertical dimensions, which is known as full-dimension (FD) MIMO. The most popular two-dimensional array is the uniform planar array (UPA), where antennas are placed in a grid pattern. To exploit the full benefit of massive MIMO in frequency division duplexing (FDD), the downlink channel state information (CSI) should be estimated, quantized, and fed back from the receiver to the transmitter. However, it is difficult to accurately quantize the channel in a computationally efficient manner due to the high dimensionality of the massive MIMO channel. In this paper, we develop both narrowband and wideband CSI quantizers for FD-MIMO taking the properties of realistic channels and the UPA into consideration. To improve quantization quality, we focus on not only quantizing dominant radio paths in the channel, but also combining the quantized beams. We also develop a hierarchical beam search approach, which scans both vertical and horizontal domains jointly with moderate computational complexity. Numerical simulations verify that the performance of the proposed quantizers is better than that of previous CSI quantization techniques.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Indoor off-body wireless communication: static beamforming versus space-time coding

The performance of beamforming versus space-time coding using a body-worn textile antenna array is experimentally evaluated for an indoor environment, where a walking rescue worker transmits data in the 2.45 GHz ISM band, relying on a vertical textile four-antenna array integrated into his garment. The two transmission scenarios considered are static beamforming at low-elevation angles and space-time code based transmit diversity. Signals are received by a base station equipped with a horizontal array of four dipole antennas providing spatial receive diversity through maximum-ratio combining. Signal-to-noise ratios, bit error rate characteristics, and signal correlation properties are assessed for both off-body transmission scenarios. Without receiver diversity, the performance of space-time coding is generally better. In case of fourth-order receiver diversity, beamforming is superior in line-of-sight conditions. For non-line-of-sight propagation, the space-time codes perform better as soon as bit error rates are low enough for a reliable data link