An interference-aware distributed transmission technique for dense small cell networks

Abstract

An ultra-dense deployment of small cells with multi-antenna nodes is expected to be the solution for coping with the huge traffic growth expected in near future. Mutual interference among coexisting users is one of the main performance bottlenecks in such dense deployment scenarios. A distributed transmission technique that can efficiently manage the interference in an uncoordinated dense small cell network is investigated in this work. The proposed interference aware scheme only requires instantaneous channel state information at the transmitter end towards the desired receiver. Motivated by penalty methods in optimisation studies, an interference dependent weighting factor is introduced to control the number of parallel transmission streams. The proposed scheme can outperform a more complex benchmark precoding scheme in terms of the sum network throughput in certain scenarios and with realistic channel estimation errors, while delivering close to the benchmark performance under general conditions.