Anywhere Decoding: Low-Overhead Uplink Interference Management for Wireless Networks

Generally, the ever-increasing demand for mobile data in recent years has cul- minated in dense deployments of wireless systems. Furthermore, due to scarcity of the available radio frequency spectrum, wireless systems have to reuse it. In light of these two facts, wireless systems are becoming more and more interference-limited. Considering macrocell-based cellular networks with centralized control, and wireless local area networks (WLANs) with decentralized control as two extremes, an interme- diate architecture is emerging that borrows specifications and technologies from both the cellular and WLAN worlds. Due to the nature of this intermediate architecture, distributed low-overhead interference mitigation techniques are desirable.

Motivated by this intermediate architecture as a potential use case, this disser- tation presents a low-overhead distributed uplink interference management scheme called anywhere decoding. We study anywhere decoding from an information-theoretic perspective and then investigate its applicability in the context of cellular networks. We compare anywhere decoding to other uplink interference management schemes in the literature with varying levels of cooperation and observe considerable gains in outage probability performance compared to baseline, non-cooperative schemes.