Interference alignment in multi-carrier interference networks

We consider an interference network with multi-carrier transmission over M parallel sub-channels. There are K transmitter-receiver pairs, each transmitter transmits a single data stream with a rank-one precoding matrix, and the receivers are assumed to be linear. We show that a necessary condition for zero interference (alignment across sub-channels) is K ≤ 2M-2. In contrast, for a Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) interference network with M×M spatial channels (full channel matrices) the corresponding condition is known to be K ≤ 2M - 1. We also characterize the sum rate at high Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNR) by bounding the SNR offset (x-intercept) of the asymptote of the sum rate vs SNR curve. For a randomly chosen aligned solution as M increases, this offset shifts to the right as logM. In contrast, the SNR offset for a MIMO interference network does not increase with M. An approximation for the performance of sampling the best out of L aligned solutions is also presented. Numerical results show the analytical asymptotes accurately predict the sum rate curves at moderate to high SNRs.