Interference Alignment

Interference channels, where multiple transmit and receive user pairs communicate using the same radio resources, are a building block of wireless networks. The interference channel is a good model for communication in cellular networks, wireless local area networks, and ad-hoc networks. Conventional thinking about the interference channel is that each user pair has no information about other users in the network and therefore its optimum strategy is to be greedy and maximize its own rate. Unfortunately, the sum of the data rates achieved across all user pairs with this strategy is of the same order as the rate of a single communication link. Recent work on the interference channel by Jafar’s group and Khandani’s group, however, has shown that sum rates can scale linearly with the number of users at high SNR, using a transmission strategy known as interference alignment.

Interference alignment is a linear precoding technique that attempts to align interfering signals in time, frequency, or space. In MIMO networks, interference alignment uses the spatial dimension offered by multiple antennas for alignment. The key idea is that users coordinate their transmissions, using linear precoding, such that the interference signal lies in a reduced dimensional subspace at each receiver.

Allowing some coordination between transmit and receive user pairs enables interference alignment. In this way, it is possible to design the transmit strategies such that the interference aligns at each receiver. From a sum rate perspective, with K user pairs, an interference alignment strategy achieves a sum throughput on the order of K/2 interference free links! Basically each user can effectively get half the system capacity. Thus unlike the conventional interference channel, there is a net sum capacity increase with the number of active user pairs. This result has special importance in cellular and ad hoc networks, showing that coordination between users can help overcome the limiting effects of interference generated by simultaneous transmission.

We have been studying several aspects of interference alignment at UT, with an emphasis on its practice. Our areas of interest include algorithms for computing interference alignment solutions and more general precoding strategies for the interference channel, interference alignment performance in measured channels, clustering to reduce overhead in interference alignment, and analysis of interference alignment in the presence of channel estimation error. You can find a recent presentation on this topic here.

IA Publications

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