On the performance of transceiver techniques for the K-user MIMO IFC with LTE-A turbo coding

The design of transceiver techniques for optimizing the performance of the K-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel (IFC) is of great importance and has been the subject of many recent research papers. However, the vast majority of the existing comparative studies for the various techniques capitalizes on their ergodic sum-rate performance and does not quantify their achievable performance with practical error correction coding. In this paper we investigate the achievable performance of different transceiver techniques for the K-user MIMO IFC with the long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) turbo coding scheme. Techniques achieving interference alignment (IA) at the interference-limited regime as well as a technique that reconfigures to the interference conditions are considered. It is shown that, for most of the tested 3-user MIMO IFCs where each transmitter may send more than one data streams, the iterative transceiver techniques result in superior achievable spectral efficiency than conventional IA.