Resource Allocation in Multi-user MIMO Networks: Interference Management and Cooperative Communications

Abstract

Nowadays, wireless communications are becoming so tightly integrated in our daily lives, especially with the global spread of laptops, tablets and smartphones. This has paved the way to dramatically increasing wireless network dimensions in terms of subscribers and amount of flowing data. Therefore, the two important fundamental requirements for the future 5G wireless networks are abilities to support high data traffic and exceedingly low latency. A likely candidate to fulfill these requirements is multicell multi-user multi-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO); also termed as coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission and reception. To achieve the highest possible performance in MU-MIMO networks, a properly designed resource allocation algorithm is needed. Moreover, with the rapidly growing data traffic, interference has become a major limitation in wireless networks. Interference alignment (IA) has been shown to significantly manage the interference and improve the network performance. However, how practically use IA to mitigate interference in a downlink MU-MIMO network still remains an open problem. In this dissertation, we improve the performance of MU-MIMO networks in terms of spectral efficiency, by designing and developing new beamforming algorithms that can efficiently mitigate the interference and allocate the resources. Then we mathematically analyze the performance improvement of MUMIMO networks employing proposed techniques. Fundamental relationships between network parameters and the network performance is revealed, which provide guidance on the wireless networks design. Finally, system level simulations are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed strategies.