Harnessing bursty interference

• Published in: 2009 IEEE Information Theory Workshop on Networking and Information Theory pp. 13 - 16
• Main Authors: Khude, N., Prabhakaran, V., Viswanath, P.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2009
• Subjects: Additive white noise; AWGN; Context; Decoding; Degradation; Gaussian noise; Interference channels; Power engineering and energy; Unicast; Wireless communication
• ISBN: 1424445353; 9781424445356
• DOI: 10.1109/ITWNIT.2009.5158532

Interference is a central feature of wireless communication. In many scenarios, interference is bursty: interfering wireless links come and go. Designing the system assuming interference to be always present is very conservative. In this paper, we take a fundamental information theoretic stand point and address the issue of statistical gain associated with bursty interference in the context of a pair of unicast interfering wireless links. Modeling the problem as a ldquodegraded message setrdquo two user Gaussian interference channel, we approximately characterize the symmetric capacity region. Our results demonstrate the fundamental existence of three regimes: one where treating interference as always there is without loss of optimality, another where one can harness as well as if interference was never there and a third where the performance is in between these two regimes.