Precoding-Based Interference Mitigation for MR-OFDM in Smart Utility Networks

Emerging smart utility networks (SUNs) provide two-way communications between smart meters and smart appliances to achieve low power usage, low cost, and high reliability. Because SUNs are composed of dense wireless devices, signal interference between the devices is an inevitable problem. This paper presents a precoder design that can reduce the effects of interference without consuming network resources, such as bandwidth and power. Unlike conventional methods, the proposed scheme can suppress the interference effect without the need for additional information to manage interference, which might cause additional resource consumption in the network. To verify the interference mitigation performance of the proposed scheme, the analytical error-rate expressions were derived as a closed form. The analysis and numerical results showed that the proposed scheme excellently mitigates the interference in asynchronous interference environments.