Opportunistic Interference Alignment for Random Access Networks

An interference management problem among multiple overlapped random access networks (RANs) is investigated, each of which operates with a slotted ALOHA protocol. Assuming that access points and users have multiple antennas, a novel opportunistic interference alignment (OIA) is proposed to mitigate interference among overlapped RANs. The proposed technique intelligently combines the transmit beamforming technique at the physical layer and the opportunistic packet transmission at the medium access control layer. Transmit beamforming is based on interference alignment, and opportunistic packet transmission is based on the generating interference of users to other RANs, which can be regarded as a joint optimization of the physical layer and the medium access control layer. It is shown that the proposed OIA protocol significantly outperforms the conventional schemes such as multipacket reception and interference nulling.