System-level performance study of interference alignment in cellular systems with base-station coordination

The performance of any transmission scheme is coupled with the receive strategy. Herein the behavior of transmissions based on interference alignment scheme is investigated under different receive strategies. Moreover, interference alignment is compared with different state-of-art transmission schemes under the assumption of intrabase station and inter-base station coordination. The performance of the above-mentioned techniques is assessed with a fully 3GPP compliant downlink LTE simulator, which gives a very realistic picture of the behavior in real systems. The results have shown that interference alignment is underperforming with respect to the baseline using base station coordination, when a realistic number of base stations is considered. Moreover, the gains of interference alignment are also highly dependent on the receiver type, whereas the baselines show relatively low differences with different receivers.