CAREER: Harnessing Interference Structure in Networks

职业：利用网络中的干扰结构

• 批准号: 1253918
• 负责人: Bobak Nazer
• 金额: $ 49.61万
• 依托单位: Trustees of Boston University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-02-01 至 2020-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1253918&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Harnessing; Interference; Structure; Networks

Wireless networks are the fabric of the mobile Internet. High-speed, ubiquitous wireless access is increasingly an enabling technology for important applications ranging from communication to commerce, medicine, and education. It is thus critical to create a pathway for sustainable wireless network growth in terms of the number of users and their data rates. A major challenge facing this effort is interference: since the wireless channel is a shared medium, simultaneous transmissions interfere with one another. This phenomenon is conventionally viewed as harmful by theorists and practitioners alike, and modern wireless protocols are designed to avoid interference. Within this paradigm, the wireless channel is a fixed resource with a finite capacity, meaning that as more users join a network, the maximum data rate per user plummets. However, interfering signals are not just additional noise; rather, they represent data from other users and possess considerable structure which can be exploited.This research pursues a novel approach to multi-user communication based on harnessing the algebraic structure of interference. The key insight is that it is possible for a receiver to first decode linear combinations of all transmitted codewords and only afterwards solve for its desired codeword in the digital domain. In many important network scenarios, this powerful technique yields significantly higher data rates compared to conventional approaches. This project leverages this technique to uncover the fundamental capacity limits of canonical wireless networks subject to interference as well as establish architectural principles for coding strategies that can efficiently approach these limits. It draws upon modern tools from combinatorial optimization to solve the resource allocation problems that emerge when this technique is applied to complex wireless networks, such as distributed multiple antenna systems. More broadly, this research lays the foundation for an algebraic network information theory to tackle challenging problems in decentralized information processing, compression, and decoding. This project incorporates several outreach efforts including interactive presentations on cellular communication for high school students, tutorials, and workshop organization.

无线网络是移动互联网的结构。高速，无处不在的无线访问越来越多地是一项重要应用，从沟通到商业，医学和教育。因此，至关重要的是，根据用户数量及其数据速率，为可持续的无线网络增长创造途径。这项工作面临的重大挑战是干扰：因为无线通道是一种共享的媒介，同时的传输彼此干扰。这种现象通常被理论家和从业者视为有害，现代无线方案旨在避免干扰。在此范式中，无线通道是具有有限容量的固定资源，这意味着随着越来越多的用户加入网络，每个用户下降的最大数据速率。但是，干扰信号不仅是额外的噪音。相反，它们代表了其他用户的数据，并具有可利用的相当大的结构。这项研究基于利用干涉的代数结构来追求一种新型的多用户沟通方法。关键的见解是，接收器有可能首先解码所有传输代码字的线性组合，并且之后只能求解其在数字域中所需的代码字。在许多重要的网络方案中，与常规方法相比，这种强大的技术产生的数据速率明显更高。该项目利用该技术来揭示受干扰的规范无线网络的基本容量限制，并为可以有效地达到这些限制的编码策略建立建筑原理。它利用了现代工具从组合优化的现代工具来解决该技术应用于复杂的无线网络（例如分布式多个天线系统）时出现的资源分配问题。从更广泛的角度来看，这项研究为代数网络信息理论奠定了基础，以解决分散信息处理，压缩和解码中的具有挑战性的问题。该项目结合了几项外展工作，包括有关高中生，教程和研讨会组织的蜂窝交流的互动演讲。