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

该项目的目标是利用可重构天线的概念在实践中实现干扰校准，并通过这样做，使人们能够更深入地了解困扰当今无线系统的“干扰屏障”。干扰对准是一种新型的传输策略，其结果是吞吐量随网络中节点数量的增加呈线性增长。计划中的研究预计将对下一代无线系统的运行方式及其在多个领域（包括公共安全、车际通信和工业物联网）的频谱访问方式产生重大影响。研究议程还将与加州大学欧文分校和德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的教育和外展活动紧密结合，并直接参与少数族裔、研究生、以及德克萨斯大学的少数族裔本科生研究经验项目。这项工作首先演示了盲干扰校准（在发射器上没有信道状态知识）确实可以在硬件上实时实现。此外，干扰对准在理论上所承诺的增益在实践中确实实现了2 × 2x通道设置。以此为基础，它继续提出在各种更一般的设置中设计，表征和开发基于可重构天线的干扰校准解决方案，包括那些我们具有部分/延迟/混合/分布式和/或交替信道状态知识的设置。在各种平台上的实现补充了这项工作。主要目标是提高无线网络的频谱效率。

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 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 complementedwith implementations on a variety of platforms. The primary goal is to improve spectral efficiency of wireless networks.