Burstiness of Interference Pikes in Wireless Networks

The temporal dynamics of interference in wireless networks affects their performance but has only been studied for some cases. This article addresses this gap by analyzing high-interference events, called pikes, concluding that they arrive in bursts in many cases. Specifically, we show that in Poisson networks with random access and multipath fading, the pike interarrival time increases with the interference correlation, irrespective of the source of correlation and burstiness of pikes. To demonstrate the applicability of this theory, we conduct a measurement campaign with an automotive user in different commercial 4G cellular networks. The experimental results indicate that interference pikes are bursty in the real world as well.