Where to place interferers in a wireless network

We study the performance of a communication link with a single-antenna transmitter and a single-antenna receiver in the presence of interferers. This is the building block of wireless systems like sensor networks or multi-cell downlink transmission networks. In more details, we analyze the impact of the location of the interferers on the outage probability of the one-to-one communication link corrupted by the interferers. In order to guarantee a fair comparison, the received average interference power level is kept constant for all scenarios. Conventionally, it is often assumed that the interferers are for simplicity located on a unit circle around the receiver. It turns out that this is a very pessimistic approach. More realistically, the interferers are distributed arbitrarily around the receiver with some interferers being closer to the receiver and some further away. Using majorization theory, we show that the outage probability is a Schur-concave function with respect to the interfererspsila location. This result basically says that having the interferers more spread out within the cell provides lower outages.