Linear interference suppression with covariance mismatches in MIMO-OFDM downlink

Interference cancellation is a key design concern for next-generation communication systems. One practical approach is the so-called interference rejection combining (IRC) scheme which treat interference as a stationary Gaussian process to simplify interference suppression design. However, this stationary assumption does not hold in practice; in particular, the statistics of the pilot and the data parts from an interfering eNodeB (eNB) are quite different. This considerably impacts the possible improvements of interference-aware receivers. In this paper, novel interference suppression schemes are proposed, which handle separately the interfering pilot and data signals. The proposed schemes take into account channel estimation errors and also the errors in covariance estimation of interference plus noise.