Cellular Interference Alignment

Interference alignment promises that, in Gaussian interference channels, each link can support half of a degree of freedom (DoF) per pair of transmit-receive antennas. However, in general, this result requires to precode the data bearing signals over a signal space of asymptotically large diversity, e.g., over an infinite number of dimensions for time-frequency varying fading channels, or over an infinite number of rationally independent signal levels, in the case of time-frequency invariant channels. In this paper, we consider a wireless cellular system scenario where the promised optimal DoFs are achieved with linear precoding in one-shot (i.e., over a single time-frequency slot). We focus on the uplink of a symmetric cellular system, where each cell is split into three sectors with orthogonal intrasector multiple access. In our model, interference is local, i.e., it is due to transmitters in neighboring cells only. We consider a noniterative local cooperation scheme where base stations pass to their neighbors their decoded messages such that interference from already decoded messages can be canceled. Therefore, for a given decoding order, the interference between sectors is described by a directed locally connected graph. The problem consists of maximizing the per-sector DoFs over all possible decoding orders and precoding schemes. In particular, we provide a decoding order and a one-shot interference alignment scheme able to achieve optimal per-sector DoFs, up to an additive gap due to boundary effects, that vanishes as the size of the network becomes large. Then, we extend our treatment by considering the case of intersector interference with joint processing of the three sector at each cell site. In order to avoid signaling schemes relying on the strength of interference, we further introduce the notion of topologically robust schemes, which are able to guarantee a minimum rate (or DoFs) irrespectively of the strength of the interfering links. Toward this end, we design a different decoding order and alignment scheme, which is topologically robust and still achieves the same optimum DoFs. Finally, we provide a new scheme for the downlink, based on local base station cooperation, where base stations pass to their neighbors a quantized version of their dirty-paper coded signals. For the proposed downlink scheme, we can prove a DoFs duality result showing that, for an appropriate choice of the precoding order and of the alignment beamforming vectors, it can achieve the same per-sector DoFs of the corresponding uplink schemes.