Cooperative and cognitive strategies for interference management in wireless communication networks (COSIMA)

The objective of COSIMA is the development of novel communication methods at the physical layer level for the interference management in wireless communication networks. Specifically, COSIMA focuses on two paradigms that, undoubtedly, will be key ingredients of future wireless networks: cooperation and cognition. Cooperative strategies are those in which several transmitters and/or receivers coordinate among them to improve efficiency or increase their performance inside a wireless network. Representative examples of cooperative schemes to be considered in COSIMA are interference alignment, non- orthogonal medium access, computational codes, and iterative receivers. On the other hand, cognitive strategies refer to those communication paradigms in which radio terminals adapt their transmission parameters with the aim of not interfering the other transmissions in the network. These parameter adaptations are based on the channel observation or environment spectrum sensing prior to the transmission. The project will develop techniques to perform interference management in a cognitive system based on channel occupancy information obtained from a sensor network. The resulting techniques are expected to provide useable real-world strategies to protect the primary system from harmful interferences.