Interference with Symbol-misalignment

TL;DR

This paper investigates how natural symbol misalignment in wireless networks can unexpectedly improve BER performance by reducing effective interference, and proposes simple schemes to induce such misalignment.

Contribution

It reveals that interference asynchrony can enhance BER and introduces minimal transmitter modifications to achieve consistent symbol misalignment.

Findings

Symbol misalignment can lower BER compared to aligned signals.

Proposed schemes induce time-varying symbol offsets without complex receiver changes.

Interference distribution and power are affected by misalignment, improving performance.

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of interference asynchrony among different links in a wireless network. Without deliberate coordination and cooperation among the active links, there is a naturally occurring misalignment between the symbols of the targeted signal of a receiver and the symbols of the interfering signals. Interestingly, we show that the interference asynchrony can actually improve the BER performance, compared with the situation in which symbols of al signals ay aligned. In particular, we show that symbol misalignment can decrease the "effective interference power" and change the distribution of the interfering signals, in a way that results in lower BER. To ensure that symbol misalignment can be consistently attained, we propose two simple schemes that introduce time-varying symbol offsets to obtain an "average" performance of random symbol misalignment. Notably, our schemes do not change the simple receiver design structure; only the transmitters are modified in a minor way.