Combining interference alignment and Alamouti codes for the 3-user MIMO interference channel

The interference channel (IC) is the basic underlying channel model for many practical multi-terminal communication scenarios. Here, we consider a modified three-user IC with dual-antenna transmitters and receivers where we allow one receiver to have a finite-rate unidirectional link to another receiver. This kind of receiver-to-receiver link may exist in cellular networks with base-station backhaul. For this scenario we propose a scheme that combines the interference-cancellation capability of Alamouti codes with the subspace-overlapping property of interference alignment to achieve a sum-rate of three symbols/channel use. The scheme does also simultaneously provide a diversity gain of two for every symbol which significantly improves the bit-error rate performance compared to zero-forcing techniques.