On the Achievable Degrees-of-Freedom by Distributed Scheduling in (N,K)-User Interference Channels

We investigate achievable degrees-of-freedom (DoF) of an (N, K)-user interference channel where only K user (transmitter-receiver) pairs among N user pairs are allowed to simultaneously communicate in a dense network (N ≫ K). Each node is assumed to have M antennas and to be randomly located. We propose a distributed scheduling protocol to achieve the maximum DoF (i.e., MK), which sequentially and opportunistically selects a user pair causing/receiving interference lower than a pre-determined threshold to/from already selected user pairs in each step. It is proven that the proposed protocol achieves the maximum DoF, MK, in the (N, K)-user interference channel with less stringent network size N, compared with the conventional centralized protocol which has been known as the best. With zero-forcing detector at receiver, we prove that it is sufficient that the network size N scales at least as ω(SNR^(M2)K(K-1)) to achieve the maximum number of DoF MK, where SNR denotes the received signal-to-noise ratio. We also investigate the required feedback overheads of the proposed protocol and show that it is quite small when the network is strongly interference-limited because only a small number of users are required to transmit their signaling. Our numerical results show that our proposed scheme controls interference more effectively than the centralized protocol.