Whitelisting in RFDMA Networks

Uplink transmissions, within coexisting distinct sub-GHz technologies operating in the same unlicensed band, can be exposed to detrimental impact of the interference. In such scenarios, transmission scheduling becomes important for mitigating interference or minimizing the impact of the interference. For this purpose, we aim to whitelist relatively better channels in terms of their yielded packet reception ratio using our proposed channel quality metric that is based on the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. In this paper, we investigate the trade-offs of the channel whitelisting in random frequency division multiple access (RFDMA) networks in the presence of the cumulative intra- and inter-technology interferences. Our main findings indicate that, although channel whitelisting reduces the degree of freedom, and thus the overall capacity, it empowers a certain amount of devices to be served at a much lower received signal power, whereas this is infeasible for non-whitelisting scenarios at larger received signal power, which signifies the energy conservation ability of our proposed whitelisting method. It is experimentally demonstrated, on Sigfox, a particular type of RFDMA network, that non-whitelisting scenarios are not capable of supporting any devices at a received signal power below -118 dBm. Even for lower received signal power, we are able to reduce the required number of retransmissions at the same reception probability, which indeed indicates that the overall reliability of the network is improved.