Feasibility of Interference Alignment for the MIMO Interference Channel

We study vector space interference alignment for the multiple-input multiple-output interference channel with no time or frequency diversity, and no symbol extensions. We prove both necessary and sufficient conditions for alignment. In particular, we characterize the feasibility of alignment for the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bresler, Guy, Cartwright, Dustin, Tse, David
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110781
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1303-582X
Description
Summary:We study vector space interference alignment for the multiple-input multiple-output interference channel with no time or frequency diversity, and no symbol extensions. We prove both necessary and sufficient conditions for alignment. In particular, we characterize the feasibility of alignment for the symmetric three-user channel where all users transmit along d dimensions, all transmitters have M antennas and all receivers have N antennas, as well as feasibility of alignment for the fully symmetric (M = N) channel with an arbitrary number of users. An implication of our results is that the total degrees of freedom available in a K-user interference channel, using only spatial diversity from the multiple antennas, is at most 2. This is in sharp contrast to the K/2 degrees of freedom shown to be possible by Cadambe and Jafar with arbitrarily large time or frequency diversity. Moving beyond the question of feasibility, we additionally discuss computation of the number of solutions using Schubert calculus in cases where there are a finite number of solutions.