Interference Alignment for One-Hop and Two-Hops MIMO Systems with Uncoordinated Interference

Providing higher data rate is a momentous goal for wireless communications systems, while interference is an important obstacle to reach this purpose. To cope with this problem, interference alignment (IA) has been proposed. In this paper, we propose two rank minimization methods to enhance the performance of IA in the presence of uncoordinated interference, i.e., interference that cannot be properly aligned with the rest of the network and thus is a crucial issue. In this scenario, perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) cases are considered. Our proposed approaches employ the l₂ and the Schatten-p norms to approximate the rank function, due to its non-convexity. Also, we propose a new convex relaxation to expand the feasible set of our optimization problem, providing lower rank solutions compared to other IA methods from the literature. In addition, we propose a modified weighted-sum method to deal with interference in the relay-aided MIMO interference channel, which employs a set of weighting parameters in order to find more solutions.