Increasing user throughput in cellular networks with interference alignment

Recent advances in information theory (IT) have shown great promises of interference alignment (IA) for cellular networks. However, due to a number of assumptions, these IT results cannot be directly applied to address practical problems. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap by studying IA for cellular networks with more practical settings. We propose an IA scheme that includes constraints at each user and each base station (BS) for the uplink communication of a cellular network. We prove the feasibility of the IA scheme by constructing the encoding and decoding vectors for each data stream so that it can be transported free of interference. Based on this IA scheme, we study an uplink user throughput maximization problem and show the throughput improvement of the IA scheme over two other schemes.