Variational Inference-based Joint Interference Mitigation and OFDM Equalization Under High Mobility

In OFDM-based spectrum sharing networks, due to inefficient coordination or imperfect spectrum sensing, the signals from femtocells or secondary users appear as interference in a subset of subcarriers of the primary systems. Together with the inter-carrier interference (ICI) introduced by high mobility, equalizing one subcarrier now depends not only on whether interference exists, but also the neighboring subcarrier data. In this letter, we propose a novel approach to iteratively learn the statistics of noise plus interference across different subcarriers, and refine the soft data estimates of each subcarrier based on the variational inference. Simulation results show that the proposed method avoids the error floor effect, which is exhibited by existing algorithms without considering interference mitigation, and performs close to the ideal case with perfect ICI cancelation and knowledge of noise plus interference powers for optimal maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) equalizer.