Linear Interference Suppression With Covariance Mismatches in MIMO-OFDM Systems

Interference cancellation is a key design concern for next-generation communication systems. One practical approach is the interference rejection combining (IRC) scheme, which is already being considered as the base receiver for next-generation 3GPP specifications. IRC treats interference as a stationary Gaussian process to facilitate simple interference suppression. However, this stationary assumption does not hold in practice; for example, the variances of the pilot signal and of the data signal from the interfering base station (eNB) are quite different. This considerably impacts the possible improvements of an interference-aware receiver. In this paper, novel interference suppression schemes are proposed, which handle separately the interfering pilot and the interfering data signals. The proposed schemes take into account channel estimation errors and the errors in estimating the covariance of interference plus noise. The performance of the proposed schemes is validated by using realistic channel models and asynchronous scenarios for MIMO-OFDM systems.