Antenna Resources Assignment for Multi-Cell Multi-User Interfering Networks Based on Interference Alignment

Utilizing spatial dimensions to align interference, interference alignment (IA) techniques can greatly improve spatial multiplexing benefits in interference-limited multiple antenna systems. In this paper, we focus on the closed-form design of IA in the multi-cell multi-user interfering networks with a finite number of antennas at each node. To obtain the same degrees of freedom (DoF), existing IA schemes employ different antenna usages on the base station (BS) side and mobile station (MS) side, leading to different DoF gain over orthogonal schemes. For practical concerns, it is unrealistic to install a lot of antennas on a MS, but realizable to deploy a large number of antennas on a massive MIMO BS. Therefore, by flexibly balancing the antenna usage between the BS side and MS side, we propose an IA based antenna resources assignment scheme, which can achieve a tradeoff between the usage of antennas and the DoF gain over orthogonal schemes.