Degrees of Freedom of Multi-Cell MIMO Interference Broadcast Channels With Distributed Base Stations

In this paper, we investigate the degrees of freedom (DoF) of a multi-cell multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference broadcast channel (IBC) with non-cooperation distributed base stations (BS), where each BS serves users of its corresponding cell. When all BSs simultaneously transmit their own signals over the same frequency band in the MIMO IBC, the edge users in each cell will suffer the inter-cell interference (ICI) and inter-user interference (IUI) signals. In order to eliminate the ICI and IUI signals, a distributed space time interference alignment (DSTIA) approach is proposed where each BS has only limited access to distributed moderately-delay channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). It is shown that the DSTIA scheme can obtain the appreciate DoF gains. In addition, the DoF upper bound is asymptotically achievable as the number of antenna at each BS increases. It is shown that the DSTIA method can get DoF gains over other interference alignment schemes with delayed CSIT in literature. Moreover, the DSTIA method can attain higher DoFs than the IA schemes with global CSIT for certain antenna configurations.