Queueing Stability and CSI Probing of a TDD Wireless Network With Interference Alignment

Abstract

This paper characterizes the performance in terms of queueing stability of a network composed of multiple MIMO transmitter-receiver pairs taking into account the dynamic traffic pattern and the probing/feedback cost. We adopt a centralized scheduling scheme that selects a number of active pairs in each time-slot. We consider that the transmitters apply interference alignment (IA) technique if two or more pairs are active, whereas in the special case where one pair is active point-to-point MIMO singular value decomposition (SVD) is used. We consider a time-division duplex (TDD) system where transmitters acquire their channel state information (CSI) by decoding the pilot sequences sent by the receivers. Since global CSI knowledge is required for IA, the transmitters have also to exchange their estimated CSIs over a backhaul of limited capacity (i.e. imperfect case). Under this setting, we characterize in this paper the stability region of the system under both the imperfect and perfect (i.e. unlimited backhaul) cases, then we examine the gap between these two resulting regions. Further, under each case we provide a centralized probing policy that achieves the max stability region. These stability regions and scheduling policies are given for the symmetric system, where all the path loss coefficients are equal to each other, as well as for the general system. For the symmetric system, we provide the conditions under which IA yields a queueing stability gain compared to SVD. Under the general system, the adopted scheduling policy is of a high computational complexity for moderate numbers of pairs, consequently we propose an approximate policy that has a reduced complexity but that achieves only a fraction of the system stability region. A characterization of this fraction is provided.