Interference alignment in heterogeneous networks using pico cell clustering

Interference alignment (IA) in heterogeneous networks (HetNet) is a promising technology that can achieve a significant increase of network capacity. However, there are some issues on IA in HetNet [1]. One of them is that each pico base station (BS) requires a large number of transmit antennas, because it tries to align all inter-pico interferences. In actual environments, the strength of inter-pico interference varies depending on the distance between pico cells, i.e., inter-pico interference from the remote pico cell is much smaller than that from the close one, so that aligning all interferences is not necessarily the best. In addition, the residual interference from macro BS that is not eliminated by IA may decrease the capacity. In this paper, we propose 1) to reduce the required number of transmit antennas at pico BS by clustering pico cells based on the strength of inter-pico interference and 2) to apply combined weight, that comprises ZF (zero forcing) weight and MMSE (minimum mean square error) weight, to pico user equipment (UE) so as to mitigate the residual interference that is not eliminated perfectly by IA. Simulation results show that by applying combined weight to pico UEs, the capacity increases compared to the case of applying only ZF weight, and that the average rate per pico cell normalized by the required number of transmit antennas at each pico BS, that is, the rate per transmit antenna can be increased with pico cell clustering, which indicates that each pico BS can utilize its transmit antennas more efficiently.