HetNets and Massive MIMO: Modeling, Potential Gains, and Performance Analysis

We consider a heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet) where a macrocell tier with a large antenna array base station (BS) is overlaid with a dense tier of small cells (SCs). We investigate the potential benefits of incorporating a massive MIMO BS in a TDD-based HetNet and we provide analytical expressions for the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency using stochastic geometry. The duplexing mode in which SCs should operate during uplink macrocell transmissions is optimized. Furthermore, we consider a reverse TDD scheme, in which the massive MIMO BS can estimate the SC interference covariance matrix. Our results suggest that significant throughput improvement can be achieved by exploiting interference nulling and implicit coordination across the tiers due to flexible and asymmetric TDD operation.Comment: invited paper, presented at IEEE-APS APWC 2013, Special Session on Advances in Physical Layer Wireless Communications, Torino, Italy, September 201

Nuts and Bolts of a Realistic Stochastic Geometric Analysis of mmWave HetNets: Hardware Impairments and Channel Aging

© 2019 IEEE.Motivated by heterogeneous network (HetNet) design in improving coverage and by millimeter-wave (mmWave) transmission offering an abundance of extra spectrum, we present a general analytical framework shedding light on the downlink of realistic mmWave HetNets consisting of K tiers of randomly located base stations. Specifically, we model, by virtue of stochastic geometry tools, the multi-Tier multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) mmWave network degraded by the inevitable residual additive transceiver hardware impairments (RATHIs) and channel aging. Given this setting, we derive the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency (ASE), and we subsequently evaluate the impact of residual transceiver hardware impairments and channel aging on these metrics. Different path-loss laws for line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight are accounted for the analysis, which are among the distinguishing features of mmWave systems. Among the findings, we show that the RATHIs have a meaningful impact at the high-signal-To-noise-ratio regime, while the transmit additive distortion degrades further than the receive distortion the system performance. Moreover, serving fewer users proves to be preferable, and the more directive the mmWaves are, the higher the ASE becomes.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Inter-tier Interference Suppression in Heterogeneous Cloud Radio Access Networks

Incorporating cloud computing into heterogeneous networks, the heterogeneous cloud radio access network (H-CRAN) has been proposed as a promising paradigm to enhance both spectral and energy efficiencies. Developing interference suppression strategies is critical for suppressing the inter-tier interference between remote radio heads (RRHs) and a macro base station (MBS) in H-CRANs. In this paper, inter-tier interference suppression techniques are considered in the contexts of collaborative processing and cooperative radio resource allocation (CRRA). In particular, interference collaboration (IC) and beamforming (BF) are proposed to suppress the inter-tier interference, and their corresponding performance is evaluated. Closed-form expressions for the overall outage probabilities, system capacities, and average bit error rates under these two schemes are derived. Furthermore, IC and BF based CRRA optimization models are presented to maximize the RRH-accessed users' sum rates via power allocation, which is solved with convex optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that the derived expressions for these performance metrics for IC and BF are accurate; and the relative performance between IC and BF schemes depends on system parameters, such as the number of antennas at the MBS, the number of RRHs, and the target signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio threshold. Furthermore, it is seen that the sum rates of IC and BF schemes increase almost linearly with the transmit power threshold under the proposed CRRA optimization solution