Optimal IA design and performance analysis for MIMO-OFDM systems with imperfect CSI

Both multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are key technologies for the fifth-generation mobile communication systems. However, interference is one of the critical challenges in MIMO–OFDM systems that degrades the overall performance. In this study, a novel interference alignment (IA) design-based diagonal-block channel charter to mitigate the interference for MIMO–OFDM systems is proposed. The proposed IA scheme can be used in physical layer security, e.g. anti-location. Based on the diagonal-block charter of the channel matrix, the optimal degree of freedom, i.e. the maximum number of multiple data streams concurrently transmitted interference-free can be achieved by IA. Correspondingly, the authors present the closed-form IA design scheme for some special scenarios, and two iterative IA ones for general scenarios in detail. Furthermore, the performance analysis of IA systems with diagonal-block channel error is provided, where the imperfect channel state information case is considered. The simulation results show that the IA design based on the diagonal-block channel can improve the sum-rate performance effectively, by sufficiently exploiting the spatial and frequency resources.