Rachel E. Learned

Interference multiple access communications

The implementation of network centric warfare on the battlefield has driven the growing demand for high capacity warfighter communication systems. Although new high capacity SATCOM systems such as WGS are being introduced in the near term, these systems use the interference avoidance paradigm, which fundamentally limits overall network performance. This paper introduces a new wireless networking paradigm called Interference Multiple Access (IMA), developed under the auspices of DARPA. The interference multiple access paradigm exploits multi-access interference to enable revolutionary improvements in wireless communication capacity and latency without the need for infrastructure, coordination, or spectrum preplanning. Simulation and over-the-air test results suggest that greater than 3X increases in network throughput (especially in low SNR scenarios) can be achieved over traditional contention and scheduled-based spectrum access approaches when applied to WIN-T NCW terminals communicating in a mesh topology over the WGS constellation.