Self-Organised Interference Mitigation in Wireless Networks Using Busy Bursts

In this paper, self-organised interference management in ad hoc networks that lack any centralised control, is addressed. Using time-multiplexed busy bursts (BB) in a minislot, the receivers actively broadcast a power signal on their reserved time-frequency slot. The potential new transmitters that intend to reuse the already reserved resources can infer from the received BB power the amount of co-channel interference (CCI) they would cause (prior to transmission) – especially if channel reciprocity can be guaranteed. This is vital information for the new transmitter to decide without any central supervision whether to transmit or defer the transmission to another time or frequency so as to limit CCI caused to the active link. Specifically, CCI is limited to a threshold value chosen system-wide. It is demonstrated that with the BB-enabled CCI mitigation approach, by setting the interference threshold parameter to an optimal value, a gain of up to 40% in sum throughput can be achieved compared to uncoordinated random medium access in such ad hoc networks. Moreover, it is demonstrated that by adjusting the systemwide threshold, the system throughput can be traded off to significantly enhance the link throughput in the lower percentiles.