Interference alignment for MIMO power line communications

Interference alignment (IA) is a multiplexing gain optimal linear precoding strategy that has been extensively studied in the context of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless interference networks. In this paper, we study the applicability of IA for MIMO power line communication (PLC) in interference scenarios. In particular, we consider different MIMO PLC networks to study the feasibility of IA as well as evaluate the performance in terms of sum-rate for these setups. To this end, we exploit minimum interference leakage (Min-IL) and maximum signal to interference plus noise ratio (Max-SINR) algorithms that were earlier proposed for IA in the context of MIMO wireless interference networks. Our results show that IA can be equally applicable to the MIMO PLC in interference scenarios as well as the sum-rate of the PLC networks can be significantly improved through the exploitation of Max-SINR algorithm. It is found that at high signal to noise ratio (SNR) the performance gain in terms of sum-rate with IA over orthogonal transmission techniques is around 30% for a 3-user 2 × 2 MIMO PLC network.