Blind Interference Alignment for Cellular Networks

We propose a blind interference alignment scheme for partially connected cellular networks. The scheme cancels both intracell and intercell interference by relying on receivers with one reconfigurable antenna and by allowing users at the cell edge to be served by all the base stations in their proximity. An outer bound for the degrees of freedom is derived for general partially connected networks with single-antenna receivers when knowledge of the channel state information at the transmitter is not available. It is demonstrated that for symmetric scenarios, this outer bound is achieved by the proposed scheme. On the other hand, for asymmetric scenarios, the achievable degrees of freedom are not always equal to the outer bound. However, the penalty is typically small, and the proposed scheme outperforms other blind interference alignment schemes. Moreover, significant reduction of the supersymbol length is achieved compared with a standard blind interference alignment strategy designed for fully connected networks.