This paper studies vector space interference alignment for the three-user MIMO interference channel with no time or frequency diversity. The main result is a characterization of the feasibility of interference alignment in the symmetric case where all transmitters have M antennas and all receivers have N antennas. If N >= M and all users desire d transmit dimensions, then alignment is feasible if and only if (2r+1)d = N. It turns out that, just as for the 3-user parallel interference channel BT09 , the length of alignment paths captures the essence of the problem. In fact, for each feasible value of M and N the maximum alignment path length dictates both the converse and achievability arguments. One of the implications of our feasibility criterion is that simply counting equations and comparing to the number of variables does not predict feasibility. Instead, a more careful investigation of the geometry of the alignment problem is required. The necessary condition obtained by counting equations is implied by our new feasibility criterion.
@cite_16 apply alignment on the signal scale to the @math -user @math MIMO IC. The converse arguments in that paper are obtained by forming a two-user interference channel with two users transmitting and decoding jointly; thus they obtain the inequality @math corresponding to @math in of the present paper.
@cite_16
2170023479
We consider the K user Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Gaussian interference channel with M antennas at each transmitter and N antennas at each receiver. It is assumed that channel coefficients are fixed and are available at all transmitters and at all receivers. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the total Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) for this channel. Using a new interference alignment technique which has been recently introduced in [1], we show that MN over M+N K degrees of freedom can be achieved for almost all channel realizations. Also, a new upper-bound on the total DOF for this channel is derived. This upper-bound coincides with our achievable DOF for K ≥ K u ≜ M+N over gcd(M,N) where gcd(M,N) denotes the greatest common divisor of M and N. This gives an exact characterization of DOF for MIMO Gaussian interference channel in the case of K ≥ K u .