Computing Reviews

Interference cancellation using space-time processing and precoding design
Li F., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated,New York, NY,2012. 108 pp.Type:Book
Date Reviewed: 02/01/13

Cellular communication networks are interference limited rather than noise limited. Interference differs from noise in that it is caused by other devices, such as other mobile devices using the same network. Whereas noise can be overcome by increasing transmission power, interference would be increased by this approach. Among the several techniques to mitigate interference, the interference-aware receiver is considered the most promising. However, as J. G. Andrews stated in 2005:

Despite the enormous amount of academic and industrial research in the past 20 years on interference-aware receivers and the large performance improvements promised by these multi-user techniques, today’s receivers still generally treat interference as background noise. [1]

The situation has not changed significantly. The basic idea of interference-aware receivers is to simultaneously receive multiple interfering users and to apply maximum-likelihood estimation to the signals. However, optimal multi-user receivers are extremely complex, with the computational needs increasing exponentially with the number of interfering users. This has led to extensive research on suboptimal multi-user receivers with manageable complexity.

This small book reports on three original research projects by the author on interference cancellation, namely, interference cancellation with perfect feedback, with quantized feedback, and for X channels. With feedback from the receiving end, channel information can be made available to the transmitter. Instead of using the receive antennas to cancel the interference, the channel information at the transmitter is used to precode the transmit signal to align different signals along orthogonal noninterfering paths. Since perfect channel information is not practical in reality, schemes with limited channel information have to be used. The author explains how quantized feedback can achieve full diversity and thus interference cancellation.

Li’s work on X channels, on the other hand, describes a scenario where two users transmit different code words to two receivers at the same time. X channels can increase the data rate considerably, up to twofold in the best case. However, the transmissions of both users interfere with each other. The author proposes a precoding and decoding scheme for X channels that supposedly can cancel the interference without sacrificing diversity.

The reader should be familiar with orthogonal space-time block coding with multiple transmit and receive antennas, and with precoding. The author presents original research work without much introduction. The book probably contains more mathematical formulas than text. Even for well-experienced communications engineers, this book is very hard reading. I can only recommend it to researchers specifically interested in new approaches in interference cancellation.


1)

Andrews, J. G. Interference cancellation for cellular systems: a contemporary overview. IEEE Wireless Communications 12, (2005), 19–29.

Reviewer:  Klaus Galensa Review #: CR140897 (1305-0347)

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