Opportunistic Interference Alignment for MIMO Interfering Multiple-Access Channels

We consider the K-cell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interfering multiple-access channel (IMAC) with time-invariant channel coefficients, where each cell consists of a base station (BS) with M antennas and N users having L antennas each. In this paper, we propose two opportunistic interference alignment (OIA) techniques utilizing multiple transmit antennas at each user: antenna selection-based OIA and singular value decomposition (SVD)-based OIA. Their performance is analyzed in terms of user scaling law required to achieve KS degrees-of-freedom (DoF), where S(≤ M) denotes the number of simultaneously transmitting users per cell. We assume that each selected user transmits a single data stream at each time-slot. It is shown that the antenna selection-based OIA does not fundamentally change the user scaling condition if L is fixed, compared with the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) IMAC case, which is given by SNR^{(K-1)S}, where SNR denotes the signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, we show that the SVD-based OIA can greatly reduce the user scaling condition to SNR^{(K-1)S-L+1} through optimizing a weight vector at each user. Simulation results validate the derived scaling laws of the proposed OIA techniques. The sum-rate performance of the proposed OIA techniques is compared with the conventional techniques in MIMO IMAC channels and it is shown that the proposed OIA techniques outperform the conventional techniques.