Adaptive Interference Alignment with CSI Uncertainty

Abstract: Interference alignment (IA) is known to significantly increase sum-throughput at high SNR in the presence of multiple interfering nodes, however, the reliability of IA is little known, which is the subject of this paper. We study the error performance of IA and compare it with conventional orthogonal transmission schemes. Since most IA algorithms require extensive channel state information (CSI), we also investigate the impact of CSI imperfection (uncertainty) on the error performance. Our results show that under identical rates, IA attains a better error performance than the orthogonal scheme for practical signal to noise ratio (SNR) values but is more sensitive to CSI uncertainty. We design bit loading algorithms that significantly improve error performance of the existing IA schemes. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive transmission scheme that not only considerably reduces error probability, but also produces robustness to CSI uncertainty.