Integrated Circuits and Systems Group

Professor Brian Evans
ECE Department, UT Austin
October 7, 2009, 5pm, ENS 637

Radio Frequency Interference Sensing and Mitigation in Wireless Receivers
Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a key limiting factor in communication performance of Wi-Fi, WiMax, cellular, and other wireless data communication systems. Sources of RFI include (1) other wireless users/services operating in the same frequency band, a.k.a. co-channel interference, (2) nearby electronic equipment, such as microwave ovens radiating in the 2.4 GHz band, and (3) the computational platform itself, including clock circuitry and power saving subsystems in laptops and notebooks. In this talk, we present statistical modeling of platform RFI, validate the models using measured platform RFI datasets, and propose receiver designs for mitigating platform RFI. Several proposed designs demonstrate 10x-100x reduction in bit error rate for single-antenna and two-antenna receivers. The statistical models for platform RFI also model co-channel interference, and can be generalized to model RFI from nearby electronic equipment.