Identifier Based Greedy Approach for Mitigating Harmful Interference

There has long been a conundrum on how to decrease harmful interference while encouraging the denser use of radio spectrum. The traditional way to mitigate interference is through conservative ex-ante (and, to some extent ex-post) power limits and enforcement methods. However, this conservative approach does not allow room for flexibility or coordination among radio systems, systems that are now more capable of minimizing interference than radio systems from even a decade ago. Exacerbating the problem is the continuing increase in device deployment and growing heterogeneity in network types, which together may soon strain the current interference management and enforcement processes. In this paper, we will explore how identification of devices could be used to ease interference. Identification for devices might already exist in the form of station id, IP, MAC, IMSI and FCC ID. However, in a more distributed and heterogeneous model, creating a more ubiquitous identification structure could be beneficial for mitigating harmful interference. By doing so we can keep track of devices/antennas and their operation modes (i.e., technical parameters), which, beyond interference mitigation, could also benefit enforcement, billing, spectrum sharing and security issues. In this paper, we show the application of granular identification of devices together with a greedy algorithm for improving interference management among heterogeneous networks.