  This paper studies interference alignment (IA) based multi-cell cooperative
resource allocation for the downlink OFDMA with universal frequency reuse.
Unlike the traditional scheme that treats subcarriers as separate dimensions
for resource allocation, the IA technique is utilized to enable
frequency-domain precoding over parallel subcarriers. In this paper, the joint
optimization of frequency-domain precoding via IA, subcarrier user selection
and power allocation is investigated for a cooperative three-cell OFDMA system
to maximize the downlink throughput. Numerical results for a simplified
symmetric channel setup reveal that the IA-based scheme achieves notable
throughput gains over the traditional scheme only when the inter-cell
interference link has a comparable strength as the direct link, and the
receiver SNR is sufficiently large. Motivated by this observation, a practical
hybrid scheme is proposed for cellular systems with heterogenous channel
conditions, where the total spectrum is divided into two subbands, over which
the IAbased scheme and the traditional scheme are applied for resource
allocation to users located in the cell-intersection region and cellnon-
intersection region, respectively. It is shown that this hybrid resource
allocation scheme flexibly exploits the downlink IA gains for OFDMA-based
cellular systems.
