Interference alignment (IA), given uncorrelated channel components and
perfect channel state information, obtains the maximum degrees of freedom in an
interference channel. Little is known, however, about how the sum rate of IA
behaves at finite transmit power, with imperfect channel state information, or
antenna correlation. This paper provides an approximate closed-form
signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) expression for IA over
multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channels with imperfect channel state
information and transmit antenna correlation. Assuming linear processing at the
transmitters and zero-forcing receivers, random matrix theory tools are
utilized to derive an approximation for the post-processing SINR distribution
of each stream for each user. Perfect channel knowledge and i.i.d. channel
coefficients constitute special cases. This SINR distribution not only allows
easy calculation of useful performance metrics like sum rate and symbol error
rate, but also permits a realistic comparison of IA with other transmission
techniques. More specifically, IA is compared with spatial multiplexing and
beamforming and it is shown that IA may not be optimal for some performance
criteria.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal
Processin