| dc.description.abstract | In multiuser wireless communications, interference not only limits the performance of the system, but also allows users to eavesdrop on other users’ messages. Hence, interference management in multiuser wireless communication has received significant attention in the last decade, both in the academia and industry. The interference channel (IC) is one of the simplest information theoretic models to analyze the effect of interference on the throughput and secrecy of individual messages in a multiuser setup. In this thesis, the IC is studied under different settings with and without the secrecy constraint. The main contributions of the thesis are as follows:
• The generalized degrees of freedom (GDOF) has emerged as a useful approximate measure of the potential throughput of a multiuser wireless system. Also, multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver can provide additional dimension for signaling, which can in turn improve the GDOF performance of the IC. In the initial part of the thesis, a K-user MIMO Gaussian IC (GIC) is studied from an achievable GDOF perspective. An inner bound on GDOF is derived using a combination of techniques such as treating interference as noise, zero-forcing receiving, interference alignment (IA), and extending the Han-Kobayashi (HK) scheme to K users. Also, outer bounds on the sum rate of the K-user MIMO GIC are derived, under different assumptions of cooperation and providing side information to the receivers. The derived outer bounds are simplified to obtain outer bounds on the GDOF. The relative performance of these bounds yields insight into the performance limits of the multiuser MIMO GIC and the relative merits of different schemes for interference management.
• Then, the problem of designing the precoding and receive filtering matrices for IA is explored for K-user MIMO (M × N) GIC. Two algorithms for designing the precoding and receive filtering matrices for IA in the block fading or constant MIMO IC with a finite number of symbol extensions are proposed. The first algorithm for IA is based on aligning a subset of the interfering signal streams at each receiver. As the first algorithm requires global channel knowledge at each node, a distributed algorithm is proposed which requires only limited channel knowledge at each node. A new performance metric is proposed, that captures the possible loss in signal dimension while designing the precoders. The performance of the algorithms are evaluated by comparing them with existing algorithms for IA precoder design.
• In the later part of the thesis, a 2-user IC with limited-rate transmitter cooperation is studied, to investigate the role of cooperation in managing interference and ensuring secrecy. First, the problem is studied in the deterministic setting, and achievable schemes are proposed, which use a combination of interference cancelation, relaying of the other user’s data bits, time sharing, and transmission of random bits, depending on the rate of the cooperative link and the relative strengths of the signal and the interference. Outer bounds on the secrecy rate are derived, under different assumptions of providing side information to receivers and partitioning the encoded message/output depending on the relative strength of the signal and the interference. The achievable schemes and outer bounds are extended to the Gaussian case. For example, while obtaining outer bounds, for the Gaussian case, it is not possible to partition the encoded message or output as performed in the deterministic case, and the novelty lies in finding the analogous quantities for the Gaussian case. The proposed achievable scheme for the Gaussian case uses a combination of cooperative and stochastic encoding along with dummy message transmission. For both the models, one of the key techniques used in the achievable scheme is interference cancelation, which has two benefits: it cancels interference and ensures secrecy simultaneously. The results show that limited-rate transmitter cooperation can greatly facilitate secure communications over 2-user ICs. | en_US |
