Interference Alignment for the K-User MIMO Interference Channel

Abstract

We consider the $K$ -user Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Gaussian interference channel with $M$ antennas at each transmitter and $N$ antennas at each receiver. It is assumed that channel coefficients are constant real numbers and are available at all transmitters and at all receivers. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) of this channel. Using the real interference alignment technique introduced in Motahari et al. , 2014, we show that $\frac {MN}{M+N} K$ degrees of freedom can be achieved for almost all channel realizations. Also, a new upper-bound on the DoF of this channel is provided. This upper-bound coincides with our achievable DoF for $K\geq K_{u} \triangleq \frac {M+N}{\gcd (M,N)}$ , where $\gcd (M,N)$ denotes the greatest common divisor of $M$ and $N$ . This gives an exact characterization of DoF for $M\times N$ MIMO Gaussian interference channel in the case of $K\geq K_{u}$ . Since there is no cooperation between transmit (or receive) antennas of each user in our transmission scheme, this result shows that the DoF benefit of joint processing in collocated antennas vanishes when the number of users is greater than a certain threshold.