Interference alignment scheme for massive MIMO system

Abstract

The performance of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is limited by pilot contamination. To reduce the pilot contamination, uplink and downlink precoding algorithms are put forward based on interference alignment criterion. In the uplink receiving processing, the target function aligns the pilot contamination and the interference signals to the same null space and acquires the maximal space degree of the desired signals. The uplink receiving precoding matrix is solved on maximal signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) criterion considering the impact of the pilot contamination on channel estimations. The uplink receiving precoding matrix is used as the downlink transmitting precoding matrix. Exploiting the channel reciprocity, it is proved that, if the uplink receiving precoding matrix achieves maximal SINR, the identical precoding matrix can be used in the downlink transmission and acquires maximal signal to leakage plus noise ratio (SLNR). Simulations show that the spectrum efficiency of the proposed algorithm can reach about 1.5 times higher than that of popular matched filtering (MF) precoding algorithm, and about 1.1 times higher than multi-cell minimum mean square error (MMSE) precoding algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm can be improved approximately linearly with the increasing of the number of antennas.