  In this paper, we propose a signal-aligned network coding (SNC) scheme for
K-user time-varying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels
with limited receiver cooperation. We assume that the receivers are connected
to a central processor via wired cooperation links with individual limited
capacities. Our SNC scheme determines the precoding matrices of the
transmitters so that the transmitted signals are aligned at each receiver. The
aligned signals are then decoded into noiseless integer combinations of
messages, also known as network-coded messages, by physical-layer network
coding. The key idea of our scheme is to ensure that independent integer
combinations of messages can be decoded at the receivers. Hence the central
processor can recover the original messages of the transmitters by solving the
linearly independent equations. We prove that our SNC scheme achieves full
degrees of freedom (DoF) by utilizing signal alignment and physical-layer
network coding. Simulation results show that our SNC scheme outperforms the
compute-and-forward scheme in the finite SNR regime of the two-user and the
three-user cases. The performance improvement of our SNC scheme mainly comes
from efficient utilization of the signal subspaces for conveying independent
linear equations of messages to the central processor.
