On stream selection for interference alignment in heterogeneous networks

This paper proposes a stream selection algorithm to deal with the interference and increase the sum capacity in the context of heterogeneous networks where cells of different types coexist. Due to the different transmit powers between the macro and small cells, interference levels are also different. Since the small cells are densely deployed, fully connected interference network between small cells is considered in this paper. The proposed algorithm performs the selection of a stream sequence among a predetermined set of sequences. Those selected sequences are the ones that mostly contribute to the sum rate when performing the exhaustive search. As a consequence, since the search space is reduced, the complexity is significantly decreased. These stream sequences form a regular structure where the first stream is associated to a pico user. Another distinguishing property of the proposed approach is that the stream sequences include at least one stream for each user. When selecting the streams, the channel matrices of the unselected streams are projected orthogonally to the virtual transmit and virtual receive channels of the selected stream in order to align the interference in the null space of these virtual channels. The performance evaluations are carried out by considering different scenarios with different numbers and locations of pico cells. It is shown that the proposed method can significantly reduce the computational complexity while achieving a very close performance to the exhaustive search.