Evaluating the effects of co-channel interference inwireless networks

The growing demand for wireless services has led to the introduction of new paradigms in spectrum sharing such as the unlicensed ISMand U-NII bands and dynamic or opportunistic spectrum access through cognitive radios. Coexistence of users in these technologies leads to increases in co-channel interference (CCI) which needs to be appropriately mitigated. CCI is often modeled as a white Gaussian noise process and assumed to simply reduce the signal-to-noise (plus interference) ratio. In this paper we consider the effect of CCI by a careful examination of the samples at the output of the matched filter receiver. We show that the timing offset between the interference and the desired signals may result in the correlation of errors in adjacent symbols. We evaluate the bit error rate (BER) resulting from CCI as well as the distribution of the total number of errors in a packet.