Cooperative Interference Mitigation for Heterogeneous Multi-Hop Wireless Networks Coexistence

This paper studies the coexistence of heterogeneous multi-hop networks, which use different physical-layer technologies. We propose a new paradigm, called cooperative interference mitigation (CIM), which exploits recent advancement in interference cancellation (IC), such as technology-independent multiple output. CIM makes it possible for disparate networks to cooperatively mitigate the interference to/from each other to enhance everyone's performance. We first show the feasibility of CIM among heterogeneous multi-hop networks by exploiting only channel-ratio information. Then, we establish two tractable models to characterize the CIM behaviors of both networks by using full IC and receiver-side IC only. We propose two bi-criteria optimization problems aiming at maximizing both networks' throughput, while cooperatively canceling the interference between them based on our two models. Several simulations are carried out to compare the Pareto-optimal throughput curves by using our CIM paradigms and traditional interference-avoidance (IAV) paradigm. By comparing the results from CIM and IAV, we show that CIM could remarkably improve the coexisting networks' throughput in different network settings.