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