Improving Macrocell - Small Cell Coexistence through Adaptive Interference Draining

The deployment of underlay small base stations (SBSs) is expected to significantly boost the spectrum efficiency and the coverage of next-generation cellular networks. However, the coexistence of SBSs underlaid to an existing macro-cellular network faces important challenges, notably in terms of spectrum sharing and interference management. In this paper, we propose a novel game-theoretic model that enables the SBSs to optimize their transmission rates by making decisions on the resource occupation jointly in the frequency and spatial domains. This procedure, known as interference draining, is performed among cooperative SBSs and allows to drastically reduce the interference experienced by both macro- and small cell users. At the macrocell side, we consider a modified water-filling policy for the power allocation that allows each macrocell user (MUE) to focus the transmissions on the degrees of freedom over which the MUE experiences the best channel and interference conditions. This approach not only represents an effective way to decrease the received interference at the MUEs but also grants the SBSs tier additional transmission opportunities and allows for a more agile interference management. Simulation results show that the proposed approach yields significant gains at both macrocell and small cell tiers, in terms of average achievable rate per user, reaching up to 37%, relative to the non-cooperative case, for a network with 150 MUEs and 200 SBSs

Spectrum Sharing Opportunities of Full-Duplex Systems using Improper Gaussian Signaling

Sharing the licensed spectrum of full-duplex (FD) primary users (PU) brings strict limitations on the underlay cognitive radio operation. Particularly, the self interference may overwhelm the PU receiver and limit the opportunity of secondary users (SU) to access the spectrum. Improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) has demonstrated its superiority in improving the performance of interference channel systems. Throughout this paper, we assume a FD PU pair that uses proper Gaussian signaling (PGS), and a half-duplex SU pair that uses IGS. The objective is to maximize the SU instantaneous achievable rate while meeting the PU quality-of-service. To this end, we propose a simplified algorithm that optimizes the SU signal parameters, i.e, the transmit power and the circularity coefficient, which is a measure of the degree of impropriety of the SU signal, to achieve the design objective. Numerical results show the merits of adopting IGS compared with PGS for the SU especially with the existence of week PU direct channels and/or strong SU interference channels