Selective interference alignment for MIMO cognitive femtocell networks

This paper presents a novel cross-tier interference management solution for coexisting two-tier networks by exploiting cognition and coordination between tiers via the use of agile radios. The cognitive users sense their environment to determine the receivers they are interfering with, and adapt to it by designing their precoders using interference alignment (IA) in order to avoid causing performance degradation to nearby receivers. The proposed approach judiciously chooses the set of users to be aligned at each receiver as a subset of the cross-tier interferers, hence is termed selective IA. The proposed solution includes identification of the subspace in which cross-tier interference signals would be aligned followed by a distributed algorithm to identify the precoders needed at the selected interferers. The intra-tier interference is then dealt with using minimum mean squared error (MMSE) interference suppression. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of selective IA for both uplink and downlink interference management.