Elevated Multiplexing and Signal Space Partitioning in the 2 User MIMO IC with Partial CSIT

Abstract: The $2$ user MIMO interference channel with arbitrary antenna configurations is studied under arbitrary levels of partial CSIT for each of the channels, to find the degrees of freedom (DoF) achievable by either user while the other user achieves his full interference-free DoF. The goal is to gain new insights due to the inclusion of MIMO (multiple antennas at both transmitters and receivers) into the signal space partitioning schemes associated with partial CSIT. An interesting idea that emerges from this study is "elevated multiplexing" where the signals are split into streams and transmitted from separate antennas at elevated power levels, which allows these signals to be jointly decoded at one receiver which has fewer spatial dimensions with lower interference floors, while another receiver is simultaneously able to separately decode these signals with a higher interference floor but across a greater number of spatial dimensions. Remarkably, we find that there is a DoF benefit from increasing the number of antennas at a transmitter even if that transmitter already has more antennas than its desired receiver and has no CSIT.