Delay-rate tradeoff for ergodic interference alignment in the Gaussian case

In interference alignment, users sharing a wireless channel are each able to achieve data rates of up to half of the non-interfering channel capacity, no matter the number of users. In an ergodic setting, this is achieved by pairing complementary channel realizations in order to amplify signals and cancel interference. However, this scheme has the possibility for large delays in decoding message symbols. We show that delay can be mitigated by using outputs from potentially more than two channel realizations, although data rate may be reduced. We further demonstrate the tradeoff between rate and delay via a time-sharing strategy. Our analysis considers Gaussian channels; an extension to finite field channels is also possible.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, presented at 48th Allerton Conference on Communication Control and Computing, 2010. Includes appendix detailing Markov chain analysi

Characterization of multi-channel interference

Multi-channel communication protocols in wireless networks usually assume perfect orthogonality between wireless channels or consider only the use of interference-free channels. The first approach may overestimate the performance whereas the second approach may fail to utilize the spectrum efficiently. Therefore, a more realistic approach would be the careful use of interfering channels by controlling the interference at an acceptable level. We present a methodology to estimate the packet error rate (PER) due to inter-channel interference in a wireless network. The methodology experimentally characterizes the multi-channel interference and analytically estimates it based on the observations from the experiments. Furthermore, the analytical estimation is used in simulations to derive estimates of the capacity in larger networks. Simulation results show that the achievable network capacity, which is defined as the number of simultaneous transmissions, significantly increases with realistic interfering channels compared with the use of only orthogonal channels. When we consider the same number of channels, the achievable capacity with realistic interfering channels can be close to the capacity of idealistic orthogonal channels. This shows that overlapping channels which constitute a much smaller band, provides more efficient use of the spectrum. Finally, we explore the correctness of channel orthogonality and show why this assumption may fail in a practical setting