A Study of Trade-off between Opportunistic Resource Allocation and Interference Alignment in Femtocell Scenarios

One of the main problems in wireless heterogeneous networks is interference between macro- and femto-cells. Using Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) to create multiple frequency orthogonal sub-channels, this interference can be completely avoided if each sub-channel is exclusively used by either macro- or a femto-cell. However, such an orthogonal allocation may be inefficient. We consider two alternative strategies for interference management, opportunistic resource allocation (ORA) and interference alignment (IA). Both of them utilize the fading fluctuations across frequency channels in different ways. ORA allows the users to interfere, but selecting the channels where the interference is faded, while the desired signal has a good channel. IA uses precoding to create interference-free transmissions; however, such a precoding changes the diversity picture of the communication resources. In this letter we investigate the interactions and the trade-offs between these two strategies.