DoF-Delay Trade-Off for the $K$-user MIMO Interference Channel With Delayed CSIT

Abstract: The degrees of freedom (DoF) of the $K$-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel are studied when perfect, but delayed channel state information is available at the transmitter side (delayed CSIT). Recent works have proposed schemes that achieve increasing DoF values, but at the cost of long communication delays. This work proposes three linear precoding strategies, formulated in such a way that the achievable DoF can be derived as a function of the transmission delay, thus elucidating its achievable DoF-delay trade-off. All strategies are based on the concept of interference alignment, and built upon three main ingredients: delayed CSIT precoding, user scheduling, and redundancy transmission. In this respect, the interference alignment is realized by exploiting delayed CSIT in order to align the interference at the non-intended receivers along the space-time domain. Finally, the latter part of this work settles that all the proposed strategies work also for constant channels, except for SISO. In such a case, the schemes can be made feasible by resorting to asymmetric complex signaling concepts. This conclusion removes the time-varying channels assumption unnecessarily common along all the literature on delayed CSIT.