Cross-tier interference management with a distributed antenna system for multi-tier cellular networks: Doc 906

In a multi-tier cellular communication system, the interference from one tier to another, denoted as cross-tier interference, is a limiting factor for the system performance. In spectrum-sharing usage, we consider the uplink cross-tier interference management of heterogeneous networks using femtocells overlaid onto the macrocells. We propose a variation of the cellular architecture and introduce a novel femtocell clustering based on interference cancellation to enhance the sum rate capacity. Our proposal is to use a distributed antenna system (DAS) as an interface to mitigate the cross-tier interference between the macrocell and femtocell tiers. By placing a DAS remote antenna unit (RAU) near a set of femtocells that experience interference from a macrocell user, the DAS can retrieve the interference symbols and feed them back to the femtocells, where each cell can perform interference cancellation when necessary. In addition, the DAS can forward the recovered data to the macrocell base station (MBS); thus, the macrocell user can reduce its transmit power to reach a RAU located closer than the MBS. By distributing the sensor nodes within the macrocell coverage, the proposed scheme can mitigate the cross-tier interference at different locations for several femtocell clusters. Our simulation results show substantial improvement in the network sum rate capacity.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]