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基础。高速、无处不在的无线接入日益成为通信、商业、医学和教育等重要应用的支持技术。因此，就用户数量及其数据速率而言，创建可持续无线网络增长的途径至关重要。这项工作面临的一个主要挑战是干扰：由于无线信道是一种共享介质，同时传输会相互干扰。这种现象传统上被理论家和实践者认为是有害的，现代无线协议旨在避免干扰。在这种范例中，无线信道是容量有限的固定资源，这意味着随着越来越多的用户加入网络，每个用户的最大数据速率会急剧下降。然而，干扰信号不仅仅是额外的噪声，而是额外的噪声。相反，它们代表来自其他用户的数据，并具有可利用的相当大的结构。本研究寻求一种基于利用干扰代数结构的多用户通信的新方法。关键的见解是，接收器可以首先解码所有传输码字的线性组合，然后才在数字域中求解其所需的码字。在许多重要的网络场景中，与传统方法相比，这种强大的技术可产生显着更高的数据速率。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，并为可以有效地接近这些限制的编码策略建立架构原则。它利用组合优化的现代工具来解决将该技术应用于复杂无线网络（例如分布式多天线系统）时出现的资源分配问题。更广泛地说，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、压缩和解码中的挑战性问题。该项目包含多项外展工作，包括针对高中生的蜂窝通信交互式演示、教程和研讨会组织。