COLLISION RESOLUTION AND INTERFERENCE ELIMINATION IN MULTIACCESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

A. H. Tewfik

Department of electrical and computer engineering, University of Texas Austin

    We define a multiaccess communication scheme that effectively eliminates interference and resolves collisions in many-to-one and many-to-many communication scenarios. Each transmitter is uniquely identified by a steering vector. All signals sent from a specific transmitter are steered into the same single-dimensional or double-dimensional subspace at all receivers hearing this transmission. This subspace is orthogonal to the noise subspace at a receiver and the signals within the subspace can be extracted using the root-MUSIC method. At high SNR, local channel knowledge and strict synchronization, the algorithm asymptotically achieves full network capacity on condition that a channel remains constant within a single time slot. Without synchronization, the worst case asymptotic performance is still greater than the 50% throughput achieved by collision resolution algorithms and interference management techniques like interference alignment.

Ahmed H Tewfik received his B.Sc. degree from Cairo University, Cairo Egypt, in 1982 and his M.Sc., E.E. and Sc.D. degrees from MIT, in 1984, 1985 and 1987 respectively. He is the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering and the Chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas Austin. He was the E. F. Johnson professor of Electronic Communications with the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota until September 2010. Dr. Tewfik worked at Alphatech, Inc. and served as a consultant to several companies. From August 1997 to August 2001, he was the President and CEO of Cognicity, Inc., an entertainment marketing software tools publisher that he co-founded, on partial leave of absence from the University of Minnesota. His current research interests are in cognitive augmentation through man-machine symbiosis and mobile computing, medical imaging and brain computing interfaces. Prof. Tewfik is a Fellow of the IEEE. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1997 - 1999. He received the IEEE third Millennium award in 2000. He was elected to the position of VP Technical Directions of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2009 and served on the board of governors of that Society from 2006 to 2008. He has given several plenary and keynote lectures at IEEE conferences.