A comparison of robustness between interference alignment and direct transmission

Interference alignment (IA) is a novel technique to manage interference for multiuser wireless communications. The basic idea of IA in managing interference is based on the subspace separation. Since this property can be easily damaged, one might image that IA is sensitive to errors appeared in channel state information (CSI), which is needed at the transmitter side of each user. In this work, we will show some comparison results between IA and direct transmission (DT). In the DT scheme, the maximum likelihood (ML) receiver is used at each user. The simulation results show that IA systems are indeed very sensitive to CSI errors compared with the DT-ML system, while the complexity of the IA systems in implementation is comparable with the DT-ML systems if the constellation of transmitted symbols is of moderate cardinality.