Study of interference alignment for wireless communications

Abstract

Interference is a fundamental issue for wireless communication networks. With interference alignment, the transmitters precode the signals before being transmitted so as to control the received signal subspace such that the interfering signals can be aligned to occupy the same signal subspace, and hence, can be all cancelled simultaneously. The technique assumes knowledge of channel conditions at transmitters (in order to know how to precode the signals). The main objective of this project is to give a comprehensive study of interference alignment in various scenarios, such as distributed alignment algorithms, the feasibility conditions, the robustness to channel estimation error, delay, spatial correlation and the impact of overhead and feedback. Besides, the use of emerging tools, such as aligned beamforming, opportunistic alignment and so on, for resource allocation problems is also to be exploited. Simulations in MATLAB are needed to fully understand the techniques.