Rate region of the K-user MIMO interference channel with imperfect transmitters

Abstract

This paper studies the rate region of a multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) system with imperfect transmitters when interference is treated as noise at the receiver side. We consider a K-user MIMO interference channel (IC) in which the transmitters suffer from an additive hardware distortion (HWD) modeled as spatially uncorrelated Gaussian noise with covariance matrix proportional to the transmit covariance matrix. We employ the difference of convex programming (DCP) technique to solve the rate-region optimization problem and obtain its stationary points. Our proposed HWD-aware algorithm outperforms the HWD-unaware design that disregards HWD. Our results show that the performance of the K-user MIMO IC is highly affected by HWD, especially in high signal-to-noise-ratio scenarios.