Joint Statistics of Radio Frequency Interference in Multiantenna Receivers

Abstract

Many wireless data communications systems, such as LTE, Wi-Fi, and Wimax, have become or are rapidly becoming interference limited due to radio frequency interference (RFI) generated by both human-made and natural sources. Human-made sources of RFI include uncoordinated devices operating in the same frequency band, devices communicating in adjacent frequency bands, and computational platform subsystems radiating clock frequencies and their harmonics. Additive RFI for these wireless systems has predominantly non-Gaussian statistics, and is well modeled by the Middleton Class A distribution for centralized networks, and the symmetric alpha stable distribution for decentralized networks. Our primary contribution is the derivation of joint spatial statistical models of RFI generated from uncoordinated interfering sources randomly distributed around a multiantenna receiver. The derivation is based on statistical-physical interference generation and propagation mechanisms. Prior results on joint statistics of multiantenna interference model either spatially independent or spatially isotropic interference, and do not provide a statistical-physical derivation for certain network environments. Our proposed joint spatial statistical model captures a continuum between spatially independent and spatially isotropic statistics, and hence includes many previous results as special cases. Practical applications include co-channel interference modeling for various wireless network environments, including wireless ad hoc, cellular, local area, and femtocell networks.