Interference-Alignment and Soft-Space-Reuse Based Cooperative Transmission for Multi-cell Massive MIMO Networks

Abstract: As a revolutionary wireless transmission strategy, interference alignment (IA) can improve the capacity of the cell-edge users. However, the acquisition of the global channel state information (CSI) for IA leads to unacceptable overhead in the massive MIMO systems. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose an IA and soft-space-reuse (IA-SSR) based cooperative transmission scheme under the two-stage precoding framework. Specifically, the cell-center and the cell-edge users are separately treated to fully exploit the spatial degrees of freedoms (DoF). Then, the optimal power allocation policy is developed to maximize the sum-capacity of the network. Next, a low-cost channel estimator is designed for the proposed IA-SSR framework. Some practical issues in IA-SSR implementation are also discussed. Finally, plenty of numerical results are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.