Antenna Selection for Reliable MIMO-OFDM Interference Alignment Systems: Measurement-Based Evaluation.

Interference alignment (IA) is a promising transmission technology enabling, essentially, the maximum achievable degrees of freedom (DOF) in $K$-user multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels. The ideal DOF of IA systems have been obtained using independent MIMO channels, which is, usually rarely observed in reality, particularly in indoor environments. Therefore, the data sum rate and symbol error-rate of IA are dramatically degraded in real-world scenarios since the correlation between MIMO channels decreases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal after alignment. For this reason, an acceptable sum rate of IA in real MIMO-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) interference channels was obtained in the literature by modifying the distance between network nodes and the separation between the antennas within each node to minimize the spatial correlation. In this paper, we propose to apply transmit antenna selection to MIMO-OFDM IA systems either through bulk or per-subcarrier selection, aiming at improving the sum-rate and/or error-rate performance under real-world channel circumstances, while keeping the minimum spatial antenna separation of 0.5 wavelengths within each node. Two selection criteria are considered: maximum sum rate (Max-SR) and minimum error rate (Min-ER). To avoid subcarrier imbalance across the antennas of each user, which is caused by per-subcarrier selection, a constrained per-subcarrier antenna selection is operated. Furthermore, a suboptimal antenna selection algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of the optimal algorithm. An experimental validation of MIMO-OFDM IA with antenna selection in an indoor wireless network scenario is presented. The experimental results are compared with deterministic channels that are synthesized using hybrid electromagnetic (EM) ray-tracing models. Our performance evaluation shows that the practical feasibility of MIMO-OFDM IA systems is significantly increased by antenna selection in real-world scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]