Determining the feasibility conditions for vector space interference alignment in the K-user MIMO interference channel with constant channel coefficients has attracted much recent attention yet remains unsolved. The main result of this paper is restricted to the symmetric square case where all transmitters and receivers have N antennas, and each user desires d transmit dimensions. We prove that alignment is possible if and only if the number of antennas satisfies N>= d(K+1) 2. We also show a necessary condition for feasibility of alignment with arbitrary system parameters. An algebraic geometry approach is central to the results.
Consider a MIMO interference channel whereby each transmitter and receiver are equipped with multiple antennas. The basic problem is to design optimal linear transceivers (or beamformers) that can maximize system throughput. The recent work [13] suggests that optimal beamformers should maximize the total degrees of freedom and achieve interference alignment in high SNR. In this paper we first consider the interference alignment problem in spatial domain and prove that the problem of maximizing the total degrees of freedom for a given MIMO interference channel is NP-hard. Furthermore, we show that even checking the achievability of a given tuple of degrees of freedom for all receivers is NP-hard when each receiver is equipped with at least three antennas. Moreover, in case where each transmitter and receiver use at most two antennas, the same problem is polynomial time solvable. Finally, we propose a distributed algorithm for transmit covariance matrix design, while assuming each receiver uses a linear MMSE beamformer. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing interference alignment algorithms in terms of system throughput.