User-Centric Interference Nulling in Downlink Multi-Antenna Heterogeneous Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a user-centric interference nulling scheme for downlink HetNets, leveraging stochastic geometry to optimize interference management and improve user signal quality.

Contribution

It proposes a novel interference nulling scheme with specific parameters and analyzes its performance using stochastic geometry, providing insights into optimal resource allocation.

Findings

Maximum IN DoF influences the outage probability's order gain.

IN thresholds affect the coefficient of outage probability.

The scheme linearly improves outage performance and identifies optimal DoF.

Abstract

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) have strong interference due to spectrum reuse. This affects the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of each user, and hence is one of the limiting factors of network performance. However, in previous works, interference management approaches in HetNets are mainly based on interference level, and thus cannot effectively utilize the limited resource to improve network performance. In this paper, we propose a user-centric interference nulling (IN) scheme in downlink two-tier HetNets to improve network performance by improving each user's SIR. This scheme has three design parameters: the maximum degree of freedom for IN (IN DoF), and the IN thresholds for the macro and pico users, respectively. Using tools from stochastic geometry, we first obtain a tractable expression of the coverage (equivalently outage) probability. Then, we characterize the asymptotic behavior of the outage probability in the high reliability regime. The asymptotic results show that the maximum IN DoF can affect the order gain of the asymptotic outage probability, while the IN thresholds only affect the coefficient of the asymptotic outage probability. Moreover, we show that the IN scheme can linearly improve the outage performance, and characterize the optimal maximum IN DoF which minimizes the asymptotic outage probability.