Interference alignment through antenna switching to improve quality of service in wireless networks

Interference alignment (IA) is a promising technique that can effectively eliminate the interference in multiuser wireless communication networks. However, in traditional IA schemes, the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) may decrease greatly when the desired signal and the interference are aligned in the similar directions by IA. Consequently, the bit error rate (BER) will be large, and the quality of service (QoS) can become unacceptable. In this paper, a novel IA scheme based on antenna switching at the receivers is proposed to improve the SINR of the received signal, and guarantee the QoS in IA wireless networks. In the proposed scheme, one reconfigurable antenna is equipped at each receiver to switch between two modes, and the best channel coefficients are selected to maximize the minimal SINR of the desired signal of all the receivers. Simulation results are presented to show that the proposed IA scheme can significantly improve the QoS of IA wireless networks.