On stream selection for interference alignment with limited feedback in heterogeneous networks

This paper presents a stream selection based interference alignment approach with imperfect channel state information for heterogeneous networks. The proposed solution constructs stream sequences by selecting only the strongest stream of each user where the first stream of the constructed stream sequences is associated to a pico user. While selecting the streams, the channel matrices of the unselected streams are projected orthogonally to the virtual transmit and receive channels of the selected stream in order to align the interference in the null space of these virtual channels. In addition, the influence of imperfect channel state information on the proposed algorithm is analysed. A bit allocation scheme is given by deriving an upper bound on the rate loss because of quantisation. The simulation results are carried out by considering various scenarios with different locations of pico cells at the cell edge regions of the macro cell. The performance results show that the proposed algorithm with the imperfect channel state information achieves higher performance than the existing algorithms. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.