RIS-Assisted Cooperative Interference Alignment Scheme for MIMO Multi-User Networks

In MIMO multi-user networks, inter-user interference (IUI) significantly affects the system performance. To handle this problem, this paper proposes the reconfigurable intelligent surface assisted cooperative interference alignment scheme (RIS-CIA). The core idea of this work is that the base station and full-duplex users jointly design space-time precoding matrices, which can reduce the dimension of the interference space on the user side. Besides, the additional interference caused by the information exchange process is split into sub-blocks by space-time precoding, then eliminated by interference nulling assisting by the passive RIS. The simulation results show that the RIS-CIA scheme with few numbers of elements obtains higher DoF than that of benchmark schemes with a huge number of elements.