NeTS: Small: Smart Interference Management for Wireless Internet of Things

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation. Award #1617634

PI: Thomas Hou

Project Duration: October 1, 2016 – September 30, 2021

Wireless Internet of Things (W-IoT) consists of billions of wireless devices, whose number is increasing at half a billion each year. These wireless devices have strong wireless communications and networking capabilities and have brought in huge amounts of data traffic over the airwaves. When multiple different devices are transmitting at the same time, there will be interference at the receivers, which could severely distort received signals and make them undecodable. To mitigate interference, many of the existing standards focus on interference avoidance, i.e., restricting to only one device transmitting at a time. This avoidance approach has poor throughput performance when wireless traffic volume in W-IoT becomes heavy. This project proposes a new approach to mitigate interference by exploiting advanced interference management (IM) techniques and programmability of new radio hardware. This approach has the potential to offer much higher throughput than existing methods. The success of this project will offer a revolutionary approach for IM in the W-IoT and offer new knowledge and methodology for future research on IM in W-IoT. New education materials will be developed and special programs to broaden participation by female and underrepresented students are planned through Wireless@VT summer symposium.

A fundamental problem to ensure that data can be smoothly transported in the W-IoT is how to manage interference effectively. Recent advances in IM have introduced a number of new techniques to exploit interference rather than avoiding it. On a separate front, advances in field-programmable hardware and software-defined radios allow many physical and link layer algorithms to be programmable on the fly. Capitalizing on these two trends, this project investigates the feasibility of making IM techniques programmable at a mobile device so that an optimal IM algorithm can be chosen and programmed in real time based on the underlying communications scenarios. This project aims to take concrete steps to realize this vision by focusing on the following research topics: (1) gain fundamental understanding of programmable IM algorithms, (2) design innovative new IM algorithms with much improved capabilities and fewer limitations, (3) provide a roadmap for optimal deployment of programmable IM in the W-IoT. System building and experimentation are embedded into each component of this project. An array of advanced IM algorithms will be implemented on the WARP platform and Virginia Tech CORNET testbed.

Publications

  • Yongce Chen, Shaoran Li, Chengzhang Li, Huacheng Zeng, Brian Jalaian, Y. T. Hou, and W. Lou, "On DoF Conservation in MIMO Interference Cancellation based on Signal Strength in the Eigenspace," accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
  • Yan Huang, Y.T. Hou, and W. Lou, "DELUXE: A DL-based Link Adaptation for URLLC/eMBB Multiplexing in 5G NR," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications special series on Machine Learning in Communications and Networks, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 143-162, January 2022.
  • Yan Huang, Y.T. Hou, and W. Lou, "A Deep-Learning-based Link Adaptation Design for eMBB/URLLC Multiplexing in 5G NR," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, online conference, May 10–13, 2021.
  • Yongce Chen, Yubo Wu, Y.T. Hou, and W. Lou, "mCore: Achieving Sub-millisecond Scheduling for 5G MU-MIMO Systems," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, online conference, May 10–13, 2021.
  • Yongce Chen, Yan Huang, Yi Shi, Y.T. Hou, Wenjing Lou, S. Kompella, "On DoF-based Interference Cancellation under General Channel Rank Conditions," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 1002–1016, June 2020.
  • Yongce Chen, Yan Huang, Chengzhang Li, Y.T. Hou, and W. Lou, "Turbo-HB: A Novel Design and Implementation to Achieve Ultra-Fast Hybrid Beamforming," In Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, online conference, July 6–9, 2020.
  • Yongce Chen, Shaoran Li, Chengzhang Li, Y.T. Hou, and Brian Jalaian, "To Cancel or Not to Cancel: Exploiting Interference Signal Strength in the Eigenspace for Efficient MIMO DoF Utilization," In Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, pp. 1954–1962, April 29–May 2, 2019, Paris, France.
  • Brian A. Jalaian, Xu Yuan, Y. Shi, Y.T. Hou, W. Lou, S.F. Midkiff, and Venkat Dasari, "On the Integration of SIC and MIMO DoF for Interference Cancellation in Wireless Networks," Springer Wireless Networks, vol. 24, issue 7, pp. 2357–2374, October 2018.
  • C. Jiang, Y. Shi, Y.T. Hou, W. Lou, S. Kompella, and S.F. Midkiff, "A General Method to Determine Asymptotic Capacity Upper Bounds for Wireless Networks under the Protocol Model," IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, vol. 6, issue 1, pp. 2–15, January–March 2019.
  • Huacheng Zeng, Xiaoqi Qin, Xu Yuan, Feng Tian, Y.T. Hou, W. Lou, and S.F. Midkiff, "On Multicast Throughput in Multi-Hop MIMO Networks with Interference Alignment," IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 67, issue 7, pp. 6627–6641, July 2018. DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2018.2817365
  • Yalin Sagduyu, Yi Shi, A.B. MacKenzie, Y.T. Hou, "Regret Minimization for Primary/Secondary Access to Satellite Resources with Cognitive Interference," IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 17, issue 5, pp. 3512–3523, MAY 2018. DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2018.2816659
  • Huacheng Zeng, Xiaoqi Qin, Xu Yuan, Y. Shi, Y.T. Hou, W. Lou, "Cooperative Interference Neutralization in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks," IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 66, issue 2, pp. 889–903, February 2018.
  • Huacheng Zeng, Y. Shi, Y.T. Hou, W. Lou, Xu Yuan, Rongbo Zhu, Jiannong Cao, "OFDM-based Interference Alignment in Single-Antenna Cellular Wireless Networks," IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 65, issue 10, pp. 4492–4506, October 2017.
  • Yongce Chen, Yan Huang, Y. Shi, Y.T. Hou, W. Lou, S. Kompella, "A General Model for DoF-based Interference Cancellation in MIMO Networks with Rank-deficient Channels," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, April 15–19, 2018, Honolulu, HI, USA.
  • Xiaoqi Qin, Xu Yuan, Zhi Zhang, Feng Tian, Y. Thomas Hou, and Wenjing Lou, "On AP Assignment and Transmission Scheduling for Multi-AP 60 GHz WLAN," in IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS) 2017, pp. 189–197, Orlando, Florida, USA, October 22–25, 2017.
  • X. Yuan, X. Qin, F. Tian, Y.T. Hou, W. Lou, S.F. Midkiff, and J.H. Reed, "Coexistence Between Wi-Fi and LTE on Unlicensed Spectrum: A Human-Centric Approach," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 964–977, April 2017.
  • H. Zeng, Y.T. Hou, Y. Shi, W. Lou, S. Kompella, and S.F. Midkiff, "A Distributed Scheduling Algorithm for Underwater Acoustic Networks with Large Propagation Delays," IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 1131–1145, March 2017.