Performance of interference alignment techniques within CoMP-like systems

Interference Alignment (IA) is a technique for mitigating the interference in wireless networks. While previous studies have mainly focused on theoretical gains and algorithms, this paper goes a step further, by assessing IA incorporated to a Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP)-like network. IA algorithms have been well studied in terms of transmissions performance and signaling cost, albeit for fixed number of users. In the current paper we evaluate the IA technique in more realistic scenarios, in which a scheduling policy is required towards providing service for a whole population of users while the sheer number of involved channels change all the time. The IA performance is shown to be in between the joint processing and conventional transmission schemes, which are distinguished by the coordination (or the lack of it) among the transmitters. By analyzing the impact of different scheduling policies based on distances between subspaces, it is concluded that the channel gains should not be disregarded by the schedulers when trying to improve system capacity.