Increasing Throughput and Reducing Delay in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Interference Alignment

Abstract

With the advent of sensor nodes with higher communication and sensing capabilities, the challenge arises in forming a data gathering network to maximize the network capacity. The channel sharing for higher data transmission leads to interfering problems. The effects of interferences become increasingly important when simultaneous transmissions are done in order to increase wireless network capacity. In such cases, achieving a high throughput and low delay is difficult. We propose a new method that uses interference alignment (IA) technique to mitigate interference effects in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In IA technique, multiple transmitters jointly encode their signals to intended receivers such that interfering signals are separated and eliminated. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to TDMA algorithms, the proposed method significantly increases the performance of the network delay and throughput by reducing the delay and increasing throughput.