Energy-aware effectiveness analysis in two-link MIMO networks

This paper investigates energy effectiveness problem for 802.11 n+ protocol in heterogeneous MIMO networks. Specifically, we consider a two-link network, where a 2 × 2 MIMO link transmits concurrently with an 1 × 1 link. We show that the completely cancelling out all the interference may result in an ineffective transmission for the incoming link. It consumes much energy on eliminating interference but achieving low transmission rate. Based on the observation, we propose a compromising nulling approach to mitigate the energy effectiveness problem. Compromising nulling takes an energy metric for transmission and interference design, which can be converted into an optimal pre-coding design problem. Numerical results show that compromising nulling strikes a balance between interfering other transmissions and maintain its own transmission effectiveness.