A Novel Joint Spatial-Code Clustered Interference Alignment Scheme for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Interference alignment (IA) has been put forward as a promising technique which can mitigate interference and effectively increase the throughput of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the number of users is strictly restricted by the IA feasibility condition, and the interference leakage will become so strong that the quality of service will degrade significantly when there are more users than that IA can support. In this paper, a novel joint spatial-code clustered (JSCC)-IA scheme is proposed to solve this problem. In the proposed scheme, the users are clustered into several groups so that feasible IA can be achieved within each group. In addition, each group is assigned a pseudo noise (PN) code in order to suppress the inter-group interference via the code dimension. The analytical bit error rate (BER) expressions of the proposed JSCC-IA scheme are formulated for the systems with identical and different propagation delays, respectively. To further improve the performance of the JSCC-IA scheme in asymmetric networks, a random grouping selection (RGS) algorithm is developed to search for better grouping combinations. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed JSCC-IA scheme is capable of accommodating many more users to communicate simultaneously in the same frequency band with better performance.