Collaborative Research: Enabling Real-Time Interference Alignment - From Theory to Practice

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to enable interference alignment in practice using the concept of reconfigurable antennas, and by doing so, enable a much deeper understanding of the "interference barrier" that plagues wireless systems today. Interference alignment is a new, novel transmission strategy that results in linear gain in throughput with the number of nodes in the network. The planned research is expected to have a significant impact on the manner in which next generation wireless systems operate and how they access spectrum in multiple domains, including public safety, inter-vehicular communication and Industrial Internet of Things (IoT). The research agenda will also be tightly integrated with education and outreach activities at University of California-Irvine and University of Texas-Austin, with direct involvement of underrepresented minorities, graduate, and undergraduate students as well as a minority focused Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at University of Texas. The effort initially begins with a demonstration that blind interference alignment (with no channel state knowledge at the transmitter) is indeed implementable in hardware, in real-time . Moreover, the gains promised by interference alignment in theory are indeed realized in practice for a 2 by 2 X channel setup. Using this as the foundation, it goes on to propose to design, characterize and develop reconfigurable-antenna-based interference alignment solutions in a variety of more general settings, including those where we have partial/delayed/mixed/distributed and/or alternating channel state knowledge. The effort is complemented with implementations on a variety of platforms. The primary goal is to improve spectral efficiency of wireless networks.