Leveraging mobile grid computing for Interference Alignment and Cancelation

Interference Alignment and Cancelation (IAC) aims at significantly improving the wireless channel capacity. Existing algorithms for IAC are computationally intensive, which may lead to long execution times. A practical implementation of IAC is infeasible for fast-varying channels (when the coherence time is small, e.g., less than 0.5 s). This is because a significant amount of time has to be spent on channel estimation as IAC techniques are extremely sensitive to the degree of accuracy of channel estimates, thus leaving a very small portion of time for actual data transmission. The collective computational capabilities of nodes in the neighborhood can be exploited (for parallelism) to facilitate the practical realization of compute-intensive IAC techniques. A novel resource provisioning framework, which organizes the mobile devices in the neighborhood to form an elastic resource pool - a heterogeneous mobile computing grid - is presented. This framework enables distributed execution of compute-intensive communication algorithms like IAC. The effectiveness of the approach is studied under different operational scenarios.