Interference models for heterogenous sources

Interference modeling is central to the analysis of many interference limited systems. The aggregate interference due to many individual interferers is often very difficult to characterize exactly, especially when lognormal shadowing and path loss is considered. Some results are available for homogeneous sources where the individual components have the same distribution, but many more detailed studies involve heterogeneous sources. Hence, in this paper we build upon previous models for homogeneous sources to develop three general purpose approaches to modeling the aggregate interference from heterogeneous sources which include both shadowing and path-loss. These models are the inverse gamma, inverse generalized gamma and extreme value distributions. These models are motivated by prior work as well as by three distinct interference scenarios relating to cognitive radio systems, digital television and femtocells. The models are fitted to these wide ranging examples and numerical results show good agreement, both for interference and SINR distributions.