Statistical Modeling of Co-Channel Interference

With increasing spatial reuse of the radio spectrum, co-channel interference is becoming the dominant noise source and may severely degrade the communication performance of wireless transceivers. In this paper, we consider the problem of statistical-physical modeling of co-channel interference. Statistical modeling of interference is a useful tool to analyze the outage probabilities in wireless networks and to design interference-aware transceivers. Our contributions include (1) developing a unified framework to derive interference models for various wireless network environments, (2) demonstrating the applicability of the symmetric alpha stable and Middleton class A distributions in modeling co-channel interference in ad-hoc and cellular network environments, and (3) deriving analytical conditions on the system model parameters for which these distributions accurately model the statistical properties of the interference. Simulation results allow us to compare the key properties of empirical co-channel interference and their statistical models under different wireless network environments.