# On Muting Mobile Terminals for Uplink Interference Mitigation in HetNets -- System-Level Analysis via Stochastic Geometry

## TL;DR

This paper introduces Interference Aware Muting (IAM), a scheduling scheme in HetNets that turns off mobile terminals causing high interference, improving spectral efficiency and reducing interference variability, with analysis via stochastic geometry.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel IAM scheme for uplink interference mitigation in HetNets, with system-level analysis and simplified expressions for practical communication system performance.

## Key findings

- IAM increases binary rate (BR) and reduces interference mean and variance.
- An operating regime exists where IAM performance is independent of cell association.
- System-level analysis confirms IAM's effectiveness in interference reduction and spectral efficiency improvement.

## Abstract

We investigate the performance of a scheduling algorithm where the Mobile Terminals (MTs) may be turned off if they cause a level of interference greater than a given threshold. This approach, which is referred to as Interference Aware Muting (IAM), may be regarded as an interference-aware scheme that is aimed to reduce the level of interference. We analyze its performance with the aid of stochastic geometry and compare it against other interference-unaware and interference-aware schemes, where the level of interference is kept under control in the power control scheme itself rather than in the scheduling process. IAM is studied in terms of average transmit power, mean and variance of the interference, coverage probability, Spectral Efficiency (SE), and Binary Rate (BR), which accounts for the amount of resources allocated to the typical MT. Simplified expressions of SE and BR for adaptive modulation and coding schemes are proposed, which better characterize practical communication systems. Our system-level analysis unveils that IAM increases the BR and reduces the mean and variance of the interference. It is proved that an operating regime exists, where the performance of IAM is independent of the cell association criterion, which simplifies the joint design of uplink and downlink transmissions.