The Practical Challenges of Interference Alignment

Interference alignment (IA) is a revolutionary wireless transmission strategy that reduces the impact of interference. The idea of interference alignment is to coordinate multiple transmitters so that their mutual interference aligns at the receivers, facilitating simple interference cancellation techniques. Since IA's inception, researchers have investigated its performance and proposed improvements, verifying IA's ability to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom (an approximation of sum capacity) in a variety of settings, developing algorithms for determining alignment solutions, and generalizing transmission strategies that relax the need for perfect alignment but yield better performance. This article provides an overview of the concept of interference alignment as well as an assessment of practical issues including performance in realistic propagation environments, the role of channel state information at the transmitter, and the practicality of interference alignment in large networks.Comment: submitted to IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin

Dynamic Interference Mitigation for Generalized Partially Connected Quasi-static MIMO Interference Channel

Recent works on MIMO interference channels have shown that interference alignment can significantly increase the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) of the network. However, most of these works have assumed a fully connected interference graph. In this paper, we investigate how the partial connectivity can be exploited to enhance system performance in MIMO interference networks. We propose a novel interference mitigation scheme which introduces constraints for the signal subspaces of the precoders and decorrelators to mitigate "many" interference nulling constraints at a cost of "little" freedoms in precoder and decorrelator design so as to extend the feasibility region of the interference alignment scheme. Our analysis shows that the proposed algorithm can significantly increase system DoF in symmetric partially connected MIMO interference networks. We also compare the performance of the proposed scheme with various baselines and show via simulations that the proposed algorithms could achieve significant gain in the system performance of randomly connected interference networks.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, accepted by IEEE Transaction on Signal Processin