Interference Recycling: Effective Utilization of Interference for Enhancing Data Transmission

Abstract

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as one of the most important application scenarios. Due to the high density of IoT devices and the limited spectrum resources, along with the miniaturization and sustainability requirements of these devices, the development of low-cost interference management (IM) methods has become crucial for widespread use of IoT. Interference has long been known to harm network performance. Since a desired signal can be distorted by interference, and thus be incorrectly decoded at the destination, we argue that interference can also be transformed intentionally to extract the desired data from interfering signal(s). Based on this observation, we propose Interference ReCycling (IRC) for the IoT. Under IRC, a recycling signal is generated using the interference a victim IoT device is subjected to, and then sent by the device’s associated gateway. Under the influence of the recycling signal, the desired data of the interfered/victim IoT transmission-pair can be recovered from the interference at the IoT device. We also show that the interfered user’s spectral efficiency (SE) with IRC can be optimized further by properly distributing the transmit power used for the desired signal’s transmission and the recycling signal. We validate the feasibility of IRC by implementing the method on the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) platform. Our theoretical analysis, experimental and numerical evaluation have shown that the proposed IRC can fully exploit interference, and hence can significantly improve the SE of the victim IoT device compared to other existing IM methods.