Abstract-In this paper, we propose an opportunistic downlink interference alignment (ODIA) for interference-limited cellular downlink, which intelligently combines user scheduling and downlink IA techniques. The proposed ODIA not only efficiently reduces the effect of inter-cell interference from other-cell base stations (BSs) but also eliminates intra-cell interference among spatial streams in the same cell. We show that the minimum number of users required to achieve a target degrees-of-freedom can be fundamentally reduced, i.e., the fundamental user scaling law can be improved by using the ODIA, compared with the existing downlink IA schemes. In addition, we adopt a limited feedback strategy in the ODIA framework, and then analyze the number of feedback bits required for the system with limited feedback to achieve the same user scaling law of the ODIA as the system with perfect channel state information. We also modify the original ODIA in order to further improve the sum-rate, which achieves the optimal multiuser diversity gain, i.e., log log N, per spatial stream even in the presence of downlink inter-cell interference, where N denotes the number of users in a cell. Simulation results show that the ODIA significantly outperforms existing interference management techniques in terms of sum rate in realistic cellular environments. Note that the ODIA operates in a non-collaborative and decoupled manner, i.e., it requires no information exchange among BSs and no iterative beamformer optimization between BSs and users, thus leading to an easier implementation. Index Terms-Inter-cell interference, interference alignment, degrees-of-freedom (DoF), transmit & receive beamforming, limited feedback, multiuser diversity, user scheduling.
Moreover, Yang et al. REF adopted a limited feedback strategy to further reduce the amount of overhead in the OIA scheme and analyzed the required number of feedback bits that can achieve the same performance.
Opportunistic Downlink Interference Alignment for Multi-Cell MIMO Networks
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Mathematics Computer Science