Heterogeneous cloud radio access networks (HCRANs) are potential solutions to improve both spectral and energy efficiencies by embedding cloud computing into heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The interference among remote radio heads (RRHs) can be suppressed with centralized cooperative processing in the base band unit (BBU) pool, while the intertier interference between RRHs and macro base stations (MBSs) is still challenging in H-CRANs. In this paper, to mitigate this inter-tier interference, a contract-based interference coordination framework is proposed, where three scheduling schemes are involved, and the downlink transmission interval is divided into three phases accordingly. The core idea of the proposed framework is that the BBU pool covering all RRHs is selected as the principal that would offer a contract to the MBS, and the MBS as the agent decides whether to accept the contract or not according to an individual rational constraint. An optimal contract design that maximizes the rate-based utility is derived when perfect channel state information (CSI) is acquired at both principal and agent. Furthermore, contract optimization under the situation where only the partial CSI can be obtained from practical channel estimation is addressed as well. Monte Carlo simulations are provided to confirm the analysis, and simulation results show that the proposed framework can significantly increase the transmission data rates over baselines, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed contract-based solution.
Femtocell is emerging as a key technology to secure the coverage and capacity in indoor environments. However the deployment of a new femtocell layer may originate undesired interference to the whole system. This paper investigates spectrum resource coordination and interference management for the femtocell networks. A resource coordination scheme based on broadcasting resource coordination request messages by the femto mobile is proposed to reduce the system interference.
We study the problem of controlling the interference created to an external observer by a communication processes. We model the interference in terms of its type (empirical distribution), and we analyze the consequences of placing constraints on the admissible type. Considering a single interfering link, we characterize the communication-interference capacity region. Then, we look at a scenario where the interference is jointly created by two users allowed to coordinate their actions prior to transmission. In this case, the trade-off involves communication and interference as well as coordinat…
Resource coordination and interference management is the key to achieving the benefits of femtocell networks. Over-the-air signaling is one of the most effective means for distributed dynamic resource coordination and interference management. However, the design of this type of signal is challenging. In this letter, we address the challenges and propose an effective solution, referred to as coded single-tone signaling (STS). The proposed coded STS scheme possesses certain highly desirable properties, such as no dedicated resource requirement (no overhead), no near-and-far effect, no inter-sign…
We generalize the problem of controlling the interference created to an external observer while communicating over a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) which was studied in \cite{serrano:2014}. In particular, we consider the scenario where the transmission is established over a compound DMC channel with unknown state at both the encoder and the decoder. Depending on the exact state $s$ of the channel, we ask for a different level of average precision $Δ_s$ on the establishment of the interference coordination with the external observer. For this set-up, we fully characterize the capacity region…
We propose a coordination scheme to minimize the interference between users in a cellular network with full-duplex base stations and half-duplex user devices. Our scheme exploits signal attenuation from obstacles between the users by (i) extracting spatially isolated regions from a radio map and (ii) assigning simultaneous co-channel uplink and downlink transmissions to users in these regions such that inter-user interference is minimized. While adding low computational complexity and insignificant signaling overhead to existing deployments, evaluating our solution with real coverage data show…
Resource coordination and interference management is the key to achieving the benefits of femtocell networks. Over-the-air signaling is one of the most effective means for distributed dynamic resource coordination and interference management. However, the design of this type of signal is challenging. In this paper, we address the challenges and propose an effective solution, referred to as coded single-tone signaling (STS). The proposed coded STS scheme possesses certain highly desirable properties, such as no dedicated resource requirement (no overhead), no near-and-far effect, no inter-signa…
Interference coordination improves data rates and reduces outages in cellular networks. Accurately evaluating the gains of coordination, however, is contingent upon using a network topology that models realistic cellular deployments. In this paper, we model the base stations locations as a Poisson point process to provide a better analytical assessment of the performance of coordination. Since interference coordination is only feasible within clusters of limited size, we consider a random clustering process where cluster stations are located according to a random point process and groups of ba…
Heterogeneous networks (het-nets) - comprising of conventional macrocell base stations overlaid with femtocells, picocells and wireless relays - offer cellular operators burgeoning traffic demands through cell-splitting gains obtained by bringing users closer to their access points. However, the often random and unplanned location of these access points can cause severe near-far problems, typically solved by coordinating base-station transmissions to minimize interference. Towards this direction, the 3rd generation partnership project Long Term Evolution-Advanced (3GPP-LTE or Rel-10) standard …
Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) and intra-cell diversity (ICD) play important roles in improving cellular downlink coverage. Modeling cellular base stations (BSs) as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP), this paper provides explicit finite-integral expressions for the coverage probability with ICIC and ICD, taking into account the temporal/spectral correlation of the signal and interference. In addition, we show that in the high-reliability regime, where the user outage probability goes to zero, ICIC and ICD affect the network coverage in drastically different ways: ICD can pr…
This work considers coordination and bargaining between two selfish users over a Gaussian interference channel using game theory. The usual information theoretic approach assumes full cooperation among users for codebook and rate selection. In the scenario investigated here, each selfish user is willing to coordinate its actions only when an incentive exists and benefits of cooperation are fairly allocated. To improve communication rates, the two users are allowed to negotiate for the use of a simple Han-Kobayashi type scheme with fixed power split and conditions for which users have incentive…
The densification and expansion of wireless network pose new challenges on interference management and reducing energy consumption. This paper studies energy-efficient resource management in heterogeneous networks by jointly optimizing cell activation, user association and multicell multiuser channel assignment, according to the long-term average traffic and channel conditions. The proposed framework is built on characterizing the interference coupling by pre-defined interference patterns, and performing resource allocation among these patterns. In this way, the interference fluctuation caused…
In this paper, we study the downlink performance of a heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet) where both macro and small cells share the same spectrum and hence interfere with each other. We assume that the users are concentrated at certain areas in the cell, i.e., they form hotspots. While some of the hotspots are assumed to have a small cell in their vicinity, the others are directly served by the macrocell. Due to a relatively small area of each hotspot, the users lying in a particular hotspot appear to be almost co-located to the macrocells, which are typically deployed at some elevation. …
The millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is envisioned to provide orders of magnitude capacity improvement. However, it is challenging to realize a sufficient link margin due to high path loss and blockages. To address this difficulty, in this paper, we explore the potential gain of ultra-densification for enhancing mmWave communications from a network-level perspective. By deploying the mmWave base stations (BSs) in an extremely dense and amorphous fashion, the access distance is reduced and the choice of serving BSs is enriched for each user, which are intuitively effective for mitigating …
Interference is a major performance bottleneck in Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) due to its multi-tier topological structure. We propose almost blank resource block (ABRB) for interference control in HetNet. When an ABRB is scheduled in a macro BS, a resource block (RB) with blank payload is transmitted and this eliminates the interference from this macro BS to the pico BSs. We study a two timescale hierarchical radio resource management (RRM) scheme for HetNet with dynamic ABRB control. The long term controls, such as dynamic ABRB, are adaptive to the large scale fading at a RRM server for co…
Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with offloading is considered as an effective way to meet the high data rate demand of future wireless service. However, the offloaded users suffer from strong inter-tier interference, which reduces the benefits of offloading and is one of the main limiting factors of the system performance. In this paper, we investigate an interference nulling (IN) scheme in improving the system performance by carefully managing the inter-tier interference to the offloaded users in downlink two-tier HetNets with multi-antenna base stations. Utilizing tools from stochastic geom…
Interference mitigation techniques are essential for improving the performance of interference limited wireless networks. In this paper, we introduce novel interference mitigation schemes for wireless cellular networks with space division multiple access (SDMA). The schemes are based on a virtual layer that captures and simplifies the complicated interference situation in the network and that is used for power control. We show how optimization in this virtual layer generates gradually adapting power control settings that lead to autonomous interference minimization. Thereby, the granularity of…
Small cell networks are regarded as a promising candidate to meet the exponential growth of mobile data traffic in cellular networks. With a dense deployment of access points, spatial reuse will be improved, and uniform coverage can be provided. However, such performance gains cannot be achieved without effective intercell interference management. In this paper, a novel interference coordination strategy, called user-centric intercell interference nulling, is proposed for small cell networks. A main merit of the proposed strategy is its ability to effectively identify and mitigate the dominant…
A simple line network model is proposed to study the downlink cellular network. Without base station cooperation, the system is interference-limited. The interference limitation is overcome when the base stations are allowed to jointly encode the user signals, but the capacity-achieving dirty paper coding scheme can be too complex for practical implementation. A new linear precoding technique called soft interference nulling (SIN) is proposed, which performs at least as well as zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming under full network coordination. Unlike ZF, SIN allows the possibility of but over-pena…
This work considers coordination and bargaining between two selfish users over a Gaussian interference channel. The usual information theoretic approach assumes full cooperation among users for codebook and rate selection. In the scenario investigated here, each user is willing to coordinate its actions only when an incentive exists and benefits of cooperation are fairly allocated. The users are first allowed to negotiate for the use of a simple Han-Kobayashi type scheme with fixed power split. Conditions for which users have incentives to cooperate are identified. Then, two different approach…
Providing consistently high wireless capacity is becoming increasingly important to support the applications required by future digital enterprises. In this paper, we propose Eigen-direction-aware ZF (EDA-ZF) with partial coordination among base stations (BSs) and distributed interference suppression as a practical approach to achieve this objective. We compare our solution with Zero Forcing (ZF), entailing neither BS coordination or inter-cell interference mitigation, and Network MIMO (NeMIMO), where full BS coordination enables centralized inter-cell interference management. We also evaluate…
In this paper, we present a novel low-complexity scheme, which improves the performance of single-antenna multi-carrier communication systems, suffering from in-phase and quadrature (I/Q)-imbalance (IQI) at the receiver. We refer to the proposed scheme as I/Q-imbalance self-interference coordination (IQSC). IQSC does not only mitigate the detrimental effects of IQI, but, through appropriate signal processing, also coordinates the self-interference terms produced by IQI in order to achieve second-order frequency diversity. However, these benefits come at the expense of a reduction in transmissi…
In this paper, we investigate the distributed power allocation for multi-cell OFDMA networks taking both energy efficiency and inter-cell interference (ICI) mitigation into account. A performance metric termed as throughput contribution is exploited to measure how ICI is effectively coordinated. To achieve a distributed power allocation scheme for each base station (BS), the throughput contribution of each BS to the network is first given based on a pricing mechanism. Different from existing works, a biobjective problem is formulated based on multi-objective optimization theory, which aims at …
Aerial-ground interference mitigation has been deemed as the main challenge in realizing cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. Due to the line-of-sight (LoS)-dominant air-ground channels, the UAV generates/suffers much stronger interference to/from cellular base stations (BSs) over a much larger region in its uplink/downlink communication, as compared to the terrestrial users. As a result, conventional inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques catered for terrestrial networks become ineffective in mitigating the more severe UAV-induced interference. To d…
3GPP LTE-Advanced has started a new study item to investigate Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) deployments as a cost effective way to deal with the unrelenting traffic demand. HetNets consist of a mix of macrocells, remote radio heads, and low-power nodes such as picocells, femtocells, and relays. Leveraging network topology, increasing the proximity between the access network and the end-users, has the potential to provide the next significant performance leap in wireless networks, improving spatial spectrum reuse and enhancing indoor coverage. Nevertheless, deployment of a large number of smal…
We propose algorithms for cloud radio access networks that not only provide heterogeneous quality of-service (QoS) for rate- and, importantly, delay-sensitive applications, but also jointly optimize the frequency reuse pattern. Importantly, unlike related works, we account for random arrivals, through queue awareness and, unlike majority of works focusing on a single frame only, we consider QoS measures averaged over multiple frames involving a set of closed loop controls. We model this problem as multi-cell optimization to maximize a sum utility subject to the QoS constraints, expressed as mi…
Device-to-device (D2D) underlaid cellular network, enabled with radio frequency energy harvesting (RFEH), and enhanced interference management schemes is a promising candidate to improve spectral and energy efficiency of next generation wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a time division duplexing (TDD)-based protocol, in which allows the devices to harvest energy from the downlink transmissions of the base station, while controlling the interference among D2D and cellular communication in the uplink. We propose two schemes for transmission coordination, based on fixed transmission pr…
The line-of-sight (LoS) air-to-ground channel brings both opportunities and challenges in cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. On one hand, the LoS channels make more cellular base stations (BSs) visible to a UAV as compared to the ground users, which leads to a higher macro-diversity gain for UAV-BS communications. On the other hand, they also render the UAV to impose/suffer more severe uplink/downlink interference to/from the BSs, thus requiring more sophisticated inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques with more BSs involved. In this paper, we cons…
An important challenge of wireless networks is to boost the cell edge performance and enable multi-stream transmissions to cell edge users. Interference mitigation techniques relying on multiple antennas and coordination among cells are nowadays heavily studied in the literature. Typical strategies in OFDMA networks include coordinated scheduling, beamforming and power control. In this paper, we propose a novel and practical type of coordination for OFDMA downlink networks relying on multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver. The transmission ranks, i.e.\ the number of transmitted …
We study here the problem of Antenna Domain Formation (ADF) in cloud RAN systems, whereby multiple remote radio-heads (RRHs) are each to be assigned to a set of antenna domains (ADs), such that the total interference between the ADs is minimized. We formulate the corresponding optimization problem, by introducing the concept of \emph{interference coupling coefficients} among pairs of radio-heads. We then propose a low-overhead algorithm that allows the problem to be solved in a distributed fashion, among the aggregation nodes (ANs), and establish basic convergence results. Moreover, we also pr…
We study the problem of inter cell interference coordination (ICIC) with fixed transmit power in OFDMA-based cellular networks, in which each base station (BS) needs to decide as to which subchannel, if any, to allocate to each of its associated mobile stations (MS) for data transmission. In general, there exists a trade-off between the total throughput (sum of throughputs of all the MSs) and fairness under the allocations found by resource allocation schemes. We introduce the concept of $τ-α-$fairness by modifying the concept of $α-$fairness, which was earlier proposed in the context of desig…
We study a number of two-user interference networks with multiple-antenna transmitters/receivers, transmitter side information in the form of linear combinations (over finite-field) of the information messages, and two-hop relaying. We start with a Cognitive Interference Channel (CIC) where one of the transmitters (non-cognitive) has knowledge of a rank-1 linear combination of the two information messages, while the other transmitter (cognitive) has access to a rank-2 linear combination of the same messages. This is referred to as the Network-Coded CIC, since such linear combination may be the…
As network deployments become denser, interference arises as a dominant performance degradation factor. To confront with this trend, Long Term Evolution (LTE) incorporated features aiming at enabling cooperation among different base stations, a technique termed as Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP). Recent field trial results and theoretical studies of the performance of CoMP schemes revealed, however, that their gains are not as high as initially expected, despite their large coordination overhead. In this paper, we review recent advanced Coordinated Beamforming (CB) schemes, a special family of …
Performance of multicell systems is inevitably limited by interference and available resources. Although intercell interference can be mitigated by Base Station (BS) Coordination, the demand on inter-BS information exchange and computational complexity grows rapidly with the number of cells, subcarriers, and users. On the other hand, some of the existing coordination beamforming methods need computation of pseudo-inverse or generalized eigenvector of a matrix, which are practically difficult to implement in a real system. To handle these issues, we propose a novel linear beamforming across a s…
The synergetic gains of spectrum sharing and millimeter wave communication networks have recently attracted attention, owing to the interference canceling benefits of highly-directional beamforming in such systems. In principle, fine-tuned coordinated scheduling and beamforming can drastically reduce cross-operator interference. However, this goes at the expense of the exchange of global channel state information, which is not realistic in particular when considering inter-operator coordination. Indeed, such an exchange of information is expensive in terms of backhaul infrastructure, and besid…
In a cooperative multiple-antenna downlink cellular network, maximization of a concave function of user rates is considered. A new linear precoding technique called soft interference nulling (SIN) is proposed, which performs at least as well as zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming. All base stations share channel state information, but each user's message is only routed to those that participate in the user's coordination cluster. SIN precoding is particularly useful when clusters of limited sizes overlap in the network, in which case traditional techniques such as dirty paper coding or ZF do not dir…
Time Interference Alignment is a flavor of Interference Alignment that increases the network capacity by suitably staggering the transmission delays of the senders. In this work the analysis of the existing literature is generalized and the focus is on the computation of the dof for networks with randomly placed users in a n-dimensional Euclidean space. In the basic case without coordination among the transmitters analytical expressions of the sum dof can be derived. If the transmit delays are coordinated, in 20% of the cases time Interference Alignment yields additional dof with respect to or…
We characterize the rate coverage distribution for a spectrum-shared millimeter wave downlink cellular network. Each of multiple cellular operators owns separate mmWave bandwidth, but shares the spectrum amongst each other while using dynamic inter-operator base station (BS) coordination to suppress the resulting cross-operator interference. We model the BS locations of each operator as mutually independent Poisson point processes, and derive the probability density function (PDF) of the K-th strongest link power, incorporating both line-of-sight and non line-of-sight states. Leveraging the ob…
In this paper, we present some contributions from our recent investigation. We address the open issue of interference coordination for sub-28 GHz millimeter-wave communication, by proposing fast-converging coordination algorithms, for dense multi-user multi-cell networks. We propose to optimize a lower bound on the network sum-rate, after investigating its tightness. The bound in question results in distributed optimization, requiring local information at each base station and user. We derive the optimal solution to the transmit and receive filter updates, that we dub non-homogeneous waterfill…
Modern cellular networks in traditional frequency bands are notoriously interference-limited especially in urban areas, where base stations are deployed in close proximity to one another. The latest releases of Long Term Evolution (LTE) incorporate features for coordinating downlink transmissions as an efficient means of managing interference. Recent field trial results and theoretical studies of the performance of joint transmission (JT) coordinated multi-point (CoMP) schemes revealed, however, that their gains are not as high as initially expected, despite the large coordination overhead. Th…
Our demo aims at proving the concept of a recent proposed interference management scheme that reduces the inter-cell interference in downlink without complex coordination, known as non-classic interference alignment (IA) scheme. We assume a case where one main Base Station (BS) needs to serve three users equipments (UE) while another BS is causing interference. The primary goal is to construct the alignment scheme ; i.e. each UE estimates the main and interfered channel coefficients, calculates the optimal interference free directions dropped by the interfering BS and feeds them back to the ma…
Scaling up the number of base stations per unit area is one of the major trends in mobile cellular systems of the fourth (4G)- and fifth generation (5G), making it increasingly difficult to characterize aggregate interference statistics with system models of low complexity. This paper proposes a new circular interference model that aggregates given interferer deployments to power profiles along circles. The model accurately preserves the original interference statistics while considerably reducing the amount of relevant interferers. In comparison to common approaches from stochastic geometry, …
A game theoretic approach is used to derive the optimal decentralized power allocation (PA) in fast fading multiple access channels where the transmitters and receiver are equipped with multiple antennas. The players (the mobile terminals) are free to choose their PA in order to maximize their individual transmission rates (in particular they can ignore some specified centralized policies). A simple coordination mechanism between users is introduced. The nature and influence of this mechanism is studied in detail. The coordination signal indicates to the users the order in which the receiver a…
Interference coordination between high-power macros and low-power picos deeply impacts the performance of heterogeneous networks (HetNets). It should deal with three challenges: user association with macros and picos, the amount of almost blank subframe (ABS) that macros should reserve for picos, and resource block (RB) allocation strategy in each eNB. We formulate the three issues jointly for sum weighted logarithmic utility maximization while maintaining proportional fairness of users. A class of distributed algorithms are developed to solve the joint optimization problem. Our framework can …
This paper investigates the extent to which spectrum sharing in mmWave networks with multiple cellular operators is a viable alternative to traditional dedicated spectrum allocation. Specifically, we develop a general mathematical framework by which to characterize the performance gain that can be obtained when spectrum sharing is used, as a function of the underlying beamforming, operator coordination, bandwidth, and infrastructure sharing scenarios. The framework is based on joint beamforming and cell association optimization, with the objective of maximizing the long-term throughput of the …
In this paper we use game theoretic techniques to study the value of cooperation in distributed spectrum management problems. We show that the celebrated iterative water-filling algorithm is subject to the prisoner's dilemma and therefore can lead to severe degradation of the achievable rate region in an interference channel environment. We also provide thorough analysis of a simple two bands near-far situation where we are able to provide closed form tight bounds on the rate region of both fixed margin iterative water filling (FM-IWF) and dynamic frequency division multiplexing (DFDM) methods…
We consider the problem of cache-aided interference management in a network consisting of $K_{\mathrm{T}}$ single-antenna transmitters and $K_{\mathrm{R}}$ single-antenna receivers, where each node is equipped with a cache memory. Transmitters communicate with receivers over two heterogenous parallel subchannels: the P-subchannel for which transmitters have perfect instantaneous knowledge of the channel state, and the N-subchannel for which the transmitters have no knowledge of the instantaneous channel state. Under the assumptions of uncoded placement and separable one-shot linear delivery ov…
In this paper we demonstrate the rate gains achieved by two-tier heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) with varying degrees of coordination between macrocell and microcell base stations (BSs). We show that without the presence of coordination, network densification does not provide any gain in the sum rate and rapidly decreases the mean per-user signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR). Our results show that coordination reduces the rate of SINR decay with increasing numbers of microcell BSs in the system. Validity of the analytically approximated mean per-user SINR over a wide range…
This paper addresses a coordination problem between two agents (Agents $1$ and $2$) in the presence of a noisy communication channel which depends on an external system state $\{x_{0,t}\}$. The channel takes as inputs both agents' actions, $\{x_{1,t}\}$ and $\{x_{2,t}\}$ and produces outputs that are observed strictly causally at Agent $2$ but not at Agent $1$. The system state is available either causally or non-causally at Agent $1$ but unknown at Agent $2$. Necessary and sufficient conditions on a joint distribution $\bar{Q}(x_0,x_1,x_2)$ to be implementable asymptotically (i.e, when the nu…
Learning Multi-Access Point Coordination in Agentic AI Wi-Fi with Large Language Models
School of Information Science and Engineering（信息科学与工程学院）；Purple Mountain Laboratories（紫金山实验室）；Wireless Technology Lab, 2012 Labs, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd（无线技术实验室，2012实验室，华为技术有限公司）
