Throughput-Efficient Scheduling and Interference Alignment for MIMO Wireless Systems

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 1779 - 1789
• Main Authors: Ronasi, Keivan, Binglai Niu, Wong, Vincent W. S., Gopalakrishnan, Sathish, Schober, Robert
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.04.2014; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Access methods and protocols, osi model; Admission control; Algorithms; Alignment; Applied sciences; Coding, codes; Encoding; Exact sciences and technology; Information, signal and communications theory; Interference; interference alignment; Lyapunov stability theory; MIMO; multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO); Networks; Optimization; Receivers; Scheduling; Signal and communications theory; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Teleprocessing networks. Isdn; Throughput; Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments); Transmitters; Vectors; Wireless communication; Access control; Performance evaluation; MIMO system; Freedom degree; Wireless telecommunication; Information rate; Scheduling; Stability criterion; Decoding; multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO); Stochastic method; Computational complexity; Information transmission; Simulation; Coding; interference alignment; Telecommunication system; Distributed algorithm; Heuristic method; Lyapunov stability; Feasibility; Lyapunov stability theory
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2014.031314.122040

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems can achieve higher throughput through interference alignment. For a small number of users, determining the maximum possible degrees of freedom as well as the feasibility of interference alignment in MIMO systems is well studied. However, the issues of scheduling in systems employing interference alignment and serving a large number of users have received little attention so far. In this paper, we study the problem of joint scheduling, interference alignment, and packet admission control in MIMO wireless systems with the goal of maximizing system throughput subject to stability constraints. We formulate a stochastic network optimization problem and propose a scheduling and interference alignment (SIA) algorithm. In each time slot, SIA schedules some users among many competing ones to transmit data, and determines encoding and decoding matrices for the selected users. Packet admission control is performed in each time slot. In addition, we propose a heuristic semi-distributed algorithm (SDSIA), which has a lower computational complexity than the SIA algorithm. Via simulation, we evaluate the performance of SIA and SDSIA for different algorithm parameters and different numbers of users. We also compare the performance of SDSIA with other approaches which do not simultaneously exploit interference alignment and scheduling and find that the combination of these two techniques increases the achievable data rate dramatically.