A Practical Cooperative Multicell MIMO-OFDMA Network Based on Rank Coordination

An important challenge of wireless networks is to boost the cell edge performance and enable multi-stream transmissions to cell edge users. Interference mitigation techniques relying on multiple antennas and coordination among cells are nowadays heavily studied in the literature. Typical strategies in OFDMA networks include coordinated scheduling, beamforming and power control. In this paper, we propose a novel and practical type of coordination for OFDMA downlink networks relying on multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver. The transmission ranks, i.e.\ the number of transmitted streams, and the user scheduling in all cells are jointly optimized in order to maximize a network utility function accounting for fairness among users. A distributed coordinated scheduler motivated by an interference pricing mechanism and relying on a master-slave architecture is introduced. The proposed scheme is operated based on the user report of a recommended rank for the interfering cells accounting for the receiver interference suppression capability. It incurs a very low feedback and backhaul overhead and enables efficient link adaptation. It is moreover robust to channel measurement errors and applicable to both open-loop and closed-loop MIMO operations. A 20% cell edge performance gain over uncoordinated LTE-A system is shown through system level simulations.Comment: IEEE Transactions or Wireless Communications, Accepted for Publicatio

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

Recent Advances in Acquiring Channel State Information in Cellular MIMO Systems

In cellular multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) systems the quality of the available channel state information (CSI) has a large impact on the system performance. Specifically, reliable CSI at the transmitter is required to determine the appropriate modulation and coding scheme, transmit power and the precoder vector, while CSI at the receiver is needed to decode the received data symbols. Therefore, cellular MUMIMO systems employ predefined pilot sequences and configure associated time, frequency, code and power resources to facilitate the acquisition of high quality CSI for data transmission and reception. Although the trade-off between the resources used user data transmission has been known for long, the near-optimal configuration of the vailable system resources for pilot and data transmission is a topic of current research efforts. Indeed, since the fifth generation of cellular systems utilizes heterogeneous networks in which base stations are equipped with a large number of transmit and receive antennas, the appropriate configuration of pilot-data resources becomes a critical design aspect. In this article, we review recent advances in system design approaches that are designed for the acquisition of CSI and discuss some of the recent results that help to dimension the pilot and data resources specifically in cellular MU-MIMO systems