An Analytical Model for Interference Alignment in Multi-Hop MIMO Networks

Abstract

Interference alignment (IA) is a powerful technique to handle interference in wireless networks. Since its inception, IA has become a central research theme in the wireless communications community. Due to its intrinsic nature of being a physical layer technique, IA has been mainly studied for point-to-point or single-hop scenario. There is a lack of research of IA from a networking perspective in the context of multi-hop wireless networks. The goal of this paper is to make such an advance by bringing IA technique to multi-hop MIMO networks. We develop an IA model consisting of a set of constraints at a transmitter and a receiver that can be used to determine IA for a subset of interfering streams. We further prove the feasibility of this IA model by showing that a DoF vector can be supported free of interference at the physical layer as long as it satisfies the constraints in our IA model. Based on the proposed IA model, we develop an IA design space for a multi-hop MIMO network. To study how IA performs in a multi-hop MIMO network, we compare the performance of a network throughput optimization problem based on our developed IA design space against the same problem when IA is not employed. Simulation results show that the use of IA can significantly decrease the DoF consumption for IC, thereby improving network throughput.