Communication Over MIMO X Channels: Interference Alignment, Decomposition, and Performance Analysis

In a multiple-antenna system with two transmitters and two receivers, a scenario of data communication, known as the X channel, is studied in which each receiver receives data from both transmitters. In this scenario, it is assumed that each transmitter is unaware of the other transmitter's data (noncooperative scenario). This system can be considered as a combination of two broadcast channels (from the transmitters' points of view) and two multiple-access channels (from the receivers' points of view). Taking advantage of both perspectives, two signaling schemes for such a scenario are developed. In these schemes, some linear filters are employed at the transmitters and at the receivers which decompose the system into either two noninterfering multiple-antenna broadcast subchannels or two noninterfering multiple-antenna multiple-access subchannels. The main objective in the design of the filters is to exploit the structure of the channel matrices to achieve the highest multiplexing gain (MG). It is shown that the proposed noncooperative signaling schemes outperform other known noncooperative schemes in terms of the achievable MG. In particular, it is shown that in some specific cases, the achieved MG is the same as the MG of the system if full cooperation is provided either between the transmitters or between the receivers. In the second part of the paper, it is shown that by using mixed design schemes, rather than decomposition schemes, and taking the statistical properties of the interference terms into account, the power offset of the system can be improved. The power offset represents the horizontal shift in the curve of the sum-rate versus the total power in decibels.