CAREER: Toward Cooperative Interference Mitigation for Heterogeneous Multi-Hop MIMO Wireless Networks

Utah State University, Logan UT

Investigators

Abstract

The ever-growing number of wireless systems and the scarcity for available spectrum necessitates highly efficient spectrum sharing among disparate wireless networks. Many of them are heterogeneous in hardware capabilities, wireless technologies, or protocol standards. The resulting cross-technology interference (CTI) can be detrimental to the performance of co-locating networks if not properly mitigated. Current interference management approaches mostly follow the interference-avoidance paradigm, where transmissions are separated in frequency, time, or space to enable spectrum sharing, rather than to reduce or eliminate interference. This project explores cooperative interference mitigation (CIM), a new coexistence paradigm among heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks. By exploiting recent advances in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) interference cancellation (IC) techniques, the proposed approach allows disparate networks to cooperatively cancel/mitigate their CTI to enhance everyone?s performance. This research focuses on the following objectives: 1) Develop tractable models/frameworks to analyze the theoretical limits and performance bounds of CIM for heterogeneous multi-hop networks, considering various forms of network heterogeneity; 2) Study the incentives of CIM through a novel game theoretic framework, that characterizes the conditions of mutual cooperation and thwarts selfish or malicious behavior; 3) Design distributed performance-approaching algorithms to achieve CIM and integrate them into practical network/MAC layer protocols, by exploiting machine learning tools and implicit inter-system communications. The expected outcomes also include the development of various simulation toolkits and system prototypes for experimental validation. The integrated education plan includes cross-discipline curriculum development, student mentoring and outreach. The proposed research will have broad impacts on unplanned heterogeneous multi-hop networks that share spectrum resources, such as current and future networks in unlicensed bands, and secondary networks in TV white spaces. Applications will benefit multiple domains including healthcare, energy, emergency services and military etc. Major results will be disseminated via conference and journal publications, software packages, talks and tutorials.