The Effect of Imperfect Channel Knowledge on a MIMO System with Interference

A common model for transmission over wireless links is that of a multiantenna system affected by an additive interfering signal. In some scenarios of interest, such as when the interferer is located close to the transmitter and performs retransmission, interference may be learned by the transmitter, but remain unknown at the receiver. In this case, it is well known that, if transmitter and receiver have perfect channel state information (CSI), then a technique called Dirty Paper Coding (DPC) is able to fully mitigate the interference. This paper studies the impact of imperfect CSI on a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with interference and compares the performance of DPC with that of a scheme where interference is decoded at the receiver, which we refer to as beamforming with joint decoding (BF-JD). Unlike DPC, which models the interference as an "unstructured" random process, BF-JD exploits the fact that the interfering signal is a codeword of the interferer\´s codebook. It is demonstrated by analysis and numerical results that BF-JD provides advantages over DPC when CSI is imperfect at the transmitter but perfect at the receiver, whereas this is not true for the case of imperfect CSI at both transmitter and receiver.