Post-doc: dealing with interference in dense wireless IoT networks

Public establishment belonging to IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom), placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, IMT Nord Europe has three main objectives: providing our students with ethically responsible engineering practice enabling them to solve 21st century issues, carrying out our R&D activities leading to outstanding innovations and supporting territorial development through innovation and entrepreneurship. Ideally positioned at the heart of Europe, 1 hour away from Paris, 30 min from Brussels and 1h30 from London, IMT Nord Europe has strong ambitions to become a main actor of the current industrial transitions, digital and environmental, by combining education and research on engineering and digital technologies.

Located on two main campuses dedicated to research and education in Douai and Lille, IMT Nord Europe offers research facilities of almost 20,000m² in the following areas:

-              Digital science,

-              Energy and Environment,

-              Materials and Processes.

For more details, visit the School’s website : www.imt-nord-europe.fr

The position is vacant within the CERI SN, ARTS (Autonomous and Resilient System axis) axis. ARTS focuses on designing distributed and communicating systems, from IoT to fleets of robots (land and aquatic). These systems address key challenges for a sustainable industry and environmental monitoring by collecting on-site data. ARTS enhances these systems' security, resilience, and autonomy across multiple layers: from physical communication and signal processing to resource-efficient software architectures. Their work ensures interoperability, scalability, and context adaptability while addressing networking issues. This approach lays the groundwork for the distributed systems of tomorrow.

In a scenario characterized by a high density of interconnected devices, achieving comprehensive global system coordination is impractical. The consequence of this lack of coordination generates important challenges and, in particular, an important degradation of communications caused by interference. Under such circumstances, interference levels can vary significantly between individual packets, with only their statistical properties estimable prior to transmission. Notably, the variance of the resulting noise due to interference remains unpredictable.

Specifying the Probability Density Function (PDF) of interference is an important issue, for instance when deriving the likelihood for designing an optimal receiver. Many works have addressed this question, from the early works by Middleton, who obtained general expressions based on series expansions assuming Poisson distributed interference sources, to more recent works underlining the heavy tail behaviour of the interference, finding its foundation in stochastic geometry.

However, we still lack an accurate model when time varying multi-dimensional (frequency-space) interference vectors are considered. The goal of this work will be to propose flexible interference models based on a-stable distributions and copulas to represent the heavy tail behaviour and the dependence structure and apply such models to improve robustness of communications in an industrial environment.

Further information

https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/founds/founds-seminar-series-talk-02-loosing-control-and-interfering

Pinto P.C. and Win M.Z. “Communication in a Poisson field of interferers-part I: interference distribution and error probability.” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 9(7):2176–2186, 2010.

Clavier L., Pedersen T., Larrad I., Lauridsen M., and Egan M. “Experimental evidence for heavy tailed interference in the iot.” IEEE Communications Letters, 25(3):692–695, 2020.

R. Adeogun, G. Berardinelli, P. E Mogensen, I. Rodriguez, and M. Razzaghpour. “Towards 6g in-x subnetworks with sub-millisecond communication cycles and extreme reliability.” IEEE Access, 8:110172–110188, 2020.

Zheng, C., Egan, M., Clavier, L. et al. “On the interference arising from random spatial fields of interferers utilizing multiple subcarriers.” J Wireless Com Network 2022, 27.

Clavier, L., Peters, G.W., Septier, F. et al. “Impulsive noise modeling and robust receiver design.” J Wireless Com Network 2021, 13 (2021).

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