Experimental validation of Interference Alignment techniques using a multiuser MIMO testbed

Abstract

Hardware platforms and testbeds are an essential tool to evaluate, in realistic scenarios, the performance of wireless communications systems. In this work we present a multiuser Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) testbed made up of 6 nodes, each one with 4 antennas, which allows us to evaluate Interference Alignment (IA) techniques in indoor scenarios. We specifically study the performance of IA for the 3-user interference channel in the 5GHz band. Our analysis identifies the main practical issues that potentially degrade the IA performance such as channel estimation errors or collinearity between the desired signal and interference subspaces.