This paper studies the interplay between device-to-device (D2D) communications and real-time monitoring systems in a cellular-based Internet of Things (IoT) network. In particular, besides the possibility that the IoT devices communicate directly with each other in a D2D fashion, we consider that they frequently send time-sensitive information/status updates (about some underlying physical processes) to their nearest base stations (BSs). By modeling the locations of the IoT devices as a bipolar Poisson Point Process (PPP) and that of the BSs as another independent PPP, we characterize the performance of the D2D links and status update links in terms of network throughput and Age-of-Information (AoI), respectively. We consider a maximum power constraint and distance-dependent fractional power control for all status update transmissions. Hence, the locations of the IoT devices allowed to send status updates are constrained to lie within the Johnson-Mehl cells. For this set-up, the average network throughput is obtained by deriving the mean success probability of the D2D links, whereas the spatial moments of the temporal mean AoI are obtained by deriving the moments of the temporal means of both success and scheduling probabilities of the status update links.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology is envisioned to enable a variety of real-time applications by interconnecting billions of sensors/devices deployed to observe some random physical processes. These IoT devices rely on low-power wide-area wireless connectivity for transmitting, mostly fixed- but small-size, status updates of their associated random processes. The cellular networks are seen as a natural candidate for providing reliable wireless connectivity to IoT devices. However, the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) to these massive number of devices is expected to degrade the …
Consider a large-scale cellular network in which base stations (BSs) serve massive Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Since IoT devices are powered by a capacity-limited battery, how to prolong their working lifetime is a paramount problem for the success of cellular IoT systems. This paper proposes how to use BSs to manage the active and dormant operating modes of the IoT devices via downlink signaling in an energy-efficient fashion and how the IoT devices perform energy-efficient uplink power control to improve their uplink coverage. We first investigate the fundamental statistical properties…
Device-to-device (D2D) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are promising technologies to meet the challenges of the next generations of mobile communications in terms of network density and diversity for internet of things (IoT) services. This paper tackles the problem of maximizing the D2D sum-throughput in an IoT system underlaying a cellular network, through optimal channel and power allocation. NOMA is used to manage the interference between cellular users and full-duplex (FD) IoT devices. To this aim, mutual successive interference cancellation (SIC) conditions are identified to all…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is large-scale by nature, which is manifested by the massive number of connected devices as well as their vast spatial existence. Cellular networks, which provide ubiquitous, reliable, and efficient wireless access, are natural candidates to provide the first-mile access for the data tsunami to be generated by the IoT. However, cellular networks may have scalability problems to provide uplink connectivity to massive numbers of connected things. To characterize the scalability of cellular uplink in the context of IoT networks, this paper develops a traffic-aware spa…
In this paper, we consider an uplink cellular Internet-of-Things (IoT) network, where a cellular user (CU) can serve as the mobile data aggregator for a cluster of IoT devices. To be specific, the IoT devices can either transmit the sensory data to the base station (BS) directly by cellular communications, or first aggregate the data to a CU through Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications before the CU uploads the aggregated data to the BS. To support massive connections, the IoT devices can leverage the unlicensed spectrum for M2M communications, referred to as IoT Unlicensed (IoT-U). Aiming …
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises ubiquitous connectivity of everything everywhere, which represents the biggest technology trend in the years to come. It is expected that by 2020 over 25 billion devices will be connected to cellular networks; far beyond the number of devices in current wireless networks. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications aims at providing the communication infrastructure for enabling IoT by facilitating the billions of multi-role devices to communicate with each other and with the underlying data transport infrastructure without, or with little, human intervention. …
Data aggregation has become an emerging paradigm to support massive Internet-of-things (IoT), a new and critical use case for fifth-generation new radio (5G-NR). Indeed, data aggregators can complement cellular base stations and process IoT traffic to reduce network congestion. In this paper, we consider using mobile data aggregators, e.g., drones, that collect IoT traffic and aggregate them to the network. Specifically, we first discuss how the spectrum can be shared between cellular users (UEs) and IoT devices in the presence of drones, proposing a time-division duplexing protocol. We use st…
Data aggregation is an effective solution to enable cellular support of Internet-of-things (IoT) communications. Indeed, it helps alleviate channel congestion, reduce the communication range, and extend battery-lifetime. In this paper, we use stochastic geometry to analyze the performance of uplink cellular IoT using different deployment strategies of aggregators, including terrestrial and aerial ones, e.g., drones or unmanned aerial vehicles. We focus on IoT-specific performance metrics, that are typically used by 3GPP. Specifically, we derive closed-form expressions of the average transmit p…
In this paper, we investigate the issue of integrated sensing, computation and communication (SCC) in beyond fifth-generation (B5G) cellular internet of things (IoT) networks. According to the characteristics of B5G cellular IoT, a comprehensive design framework integrating SCC is put forward for massive IoT. For sensing, highly accurate sensed information at IoT devices are sent to the base station (BS) by using non-orthogonal communication over wireless multiple access channels. Meanwhile, for computation, a novel technique, namely over-the-air computation (AirComp), is adopted to substantia…
We propose an enhanced random access (RA) with preamble-assisted short-packet transmissions to support cellular Internet-of-things (IoT) communications. A key feature of the proposed scheme is that the base station (e.g., eNodeB in LTE networks) utilizes the RA preambles as uplink reference signals to estimate uplink channel state information of IoT devices, which subsequently provides additional opportunities to transmit short-packets during the RA procedure without extra signaling (e.g., connection and scheduling requests). Through simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed sch…
In this paper, we study compressive random access (CRA) with two stages for machine-type communication (MTC) in cellular Internet-of-Things (IoT). In particular, we consider the case that each user (IoT device or sensor) has only one short message (of the same length) when it is activated to send data in IoT applications. Two different CRA-based random access schemes are discussed (one is conventional and the other is new based on a simplified handshaking process). Based on the throughput analysis, we show that the CRA-based random access scheme with simplified handshaking process can outperfo…
Ambient radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting has emerged as a promising solution for powering small devices and sensors in massive Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem due to its ubiquity and cost efficiency. In this paper, we study joint uplink and downlink coverage of cellular-based ambient RF energy harvesting IoT where the cellular network is assumed to be the only source of RF energy. We consider a time division-based approach for power and information transmission where each time-slot is partitioned into three sub-slots: (i) charging sub-slot during which the cellular base stations (BSs)…
Code-expanded Random Access (CeRA) is a promising technique for supporting mMTC in cellular IoT networks. However, its potentiality is limited by code ambiguity, which results from the inference of a larger number of codewords than those actually transmitted. In this letter, we propose a random access scheme to alleviate this problem by allowing devices to select the preambles to be transmitted considering a q-ary code with maximum average distance. Moreover, a CeRA decoding approach based on hypergraphs is proposed and an analytical model is derived. Numerical results show that the proposed s…
Billions of sensors are expected to be connected to the Internet through the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Many of these sensors will primarily be connected using wireless technologies powered using batteries as their sole energy source which makes it paramount to optimize their energy consumption. In this paper, we provide an analytic framework of the energy-consumption profile and its lower bound for an IoT end device formulated based on Shannon capacity. We extend the study to model the average energy-consumption performance based on the random geometric distribution of Io…
In this paper, we propose a preamble (PA) collision resolution (PACR) scheme based on multiple timing advance (TA) values captured via tagged PAs. In the proposed PACR scheme, tags are embedded in random access (RA) PAs and multiple TA values are captured for a single detected PA during a tag detection procedure. The proposed PACR scheme significantly improves RA success probability for stationary machine nodes since the nodes using collided PAs can successfully complete the corresponding RAs using exclusive data resource blocks.
Symbiotic radio (SR) has emerged as a spectrum- and energy-efficient paradigm to support massive Internet of Things (IoT) connections. Two multiple access schemes are proposed in this paper to facilitate the massive IoT connections using the cellular network based on the SR technique, namely, the simultaneous access (SA) scheme and the selection diversity access (SDA) scheme. In the SA scheme, the base station (BS) transmits information to the receiver while multiple IoT devices transmit their information simultaneously by passively backscattering the BS signal to the receiver, while in the SD…
Decentralized coded content caching for next generation cellular networks is studied. The contents are linearly combined and cached in under-utilized caches of User Terminals (UTs) and its throughput capacity is compared with decentralized uncoded content caching. In both scenarios, we consider multihop Device-to-Device (D2D) communications and the use of femtocaches in the network. It is shown that decentralized coded content caching can increase the network throughput capacity compared to decentralized uncoded caching by reducing the number of hops needed to deliver the desired content. Furt…
The cellular internet of things (CIoT) has become an important branch to cater various applications of IoT devices. Within CIoT, the radio resource control (RRC) layer is responsible for fundamental functionalities such as connection control and bearer establishment in radio access network (RAN). The emergence of various IoT scenarios and diversified service requirements have made both RAN slicing and intelligent control imperative requirement in RRC layer. This paper focuses on enhancing standardized capabilities of CIoT RRC layer, by designing and implementing a new architecture which accomm…
In this paper, we are interested in symbiotic radio networks, in which an Internet-of-Things (IoT) network parasitizes in a primary network to achieve spectrum-, energy-, and infrastructure-efficient communications. Specifically, the BS serves multiple cellular users using time division multiple access (TDMA) and each IoT device is associated with one cellular user for information transmission. We focus on the user association problem, whose objective is to link each IoT device to an appropriate cellular user by maximizing the sum rate of all IoT devices. However, the difficulty in obtaining t…
Developing low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) solutions that are efficient to adopt, deploy and maintain are vital for smart cities. The poor quality-of-service of unlicensed LPWAN, and the high service cost of LTE-M/NB-IoT are key disadvantages of these technologies. Concatenating unlicensed with licensed LPWANs can overcome these limitations and harness their benefits. However, a concatenated LPWAN architecture will inevitably result in excess latency which may impact users' quality-of-experience (QoE). To evaluate the real-life feasibility of this system, we first propose a concatenated LP…
The throughput of a linear cellular uplink with a random number of users, different power control schemes, and cooperative base stations is considered in the large system limit where the number of cells is large for non fading Gaussian channels. The analysis is facilitated by establishing an analogy between the cellular channel per-cell throughput with joint multi-cell processing (MCP), and the rate of a deterministic inter-symbol interference (ISI) channel with flat fading. It is shown that, under certain conditions, the dynamics of cellular systems (i.e., a random number of users coupled wit…
This paper presents a puncturing technique based on the channel polarization index for the design of rate-compatible polar codes in the fifth generation (5G) of wireless systems. The proposed strategy consists of two steps: we first generate the codeword message; and then we reduce the length of the codeword based on the channel polarization index where channels with the smallest channel polarization indices are punctured. We consider the proposed punctured polar codes with the successive cancellation (SC) decoder and the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) aided SC list (CA-SCL) decoder and punctur…
Massive Internet of Things (mIoT) has provided an auspicious opportunity to build powerful and ubiquitous connections that faces a plethora of new challenges, where cellular networks are potential solutions due to their high scalability, reliability, and efficiency. The Random Access CHannel (RACH) procedure is the first step of connection establishment between IoT devices and Base Stations (BSs) in the cellular-based mIoT network, where modelling the interactions between static properties of physical layer network and dynamic properties of queue evolving in each IoT device are challenging. To…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising paradigm to accommodate massive device connections in 5G and beyond. To pave the way for future IoT, the spectrum should be planed in advance. Spectrum sharing is a preferable solution for IoT due to the scarcity of available spectrum resource. In particular, mobile operators are inclined to exploit the existing standards and infrastructures of current cellular networks and deploy IoT within licensed cellular spectrum. Yet, proprietary companies prefer to deploy IoT within unlicensed spectrum to avoid any licence fee. In this paper, we provide a surv…
Machine-to-machine (M2M) constitutes the communication paradigm at the basis of Internet of Things (IoT) vision. M2M solutions allow billions of multi-role devices to communicate with each other or with the underlying data transport infrastructure without, or with minimal, human intervention. Current solutions for wireless transmissions originally designed for human-based applications thus require a substantial shift to cope with the capacity issues in managing a huge amount of M2M devices. In this paper, we consider the multiple access techniques as promising solutions to support a large numb…
The effort to extend cellular technologies to unlicensed spectrum has been gaining high momentum. Listen-before-talk (LBT) is enforced in the regions such as European Union and Japan to harmonize coexistence of cellular and incumbent systems in unlicensed spectrum. In this paper, we study throughput optimal LBT transmission strategy for load based equipment (LBE). We find that the optimal rule is a pure threshold policy: The LBE should stop listening and transmit once the channel quality exceeds an optimized threshold. We also reveal the optimal set of LBT parameters that are compliant with re…
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new cellular technology introduced in 3GPP Release 13 for providing wide-area coverage for the Internet of Things (IoT). This article provides an overview of the air interface of NB-IoT. We describe how NB-IoT addresses key IoT requirements such as deployment flexibility, low device complexity, long battery life time, support of massive number of devices in a cell, and significant coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. We also share the various design rationales during the standardization of NB-IoT in Release 13 and point out sever…
Rateless codes have been shown to provide robust error correction over a wide range of binary and noisy channels. Using a stochastic geometry model, this paper studies the performance of rateless codes in the cellular downlink and compares it with the performance of fixed-rate codes. For the case of Rayleigh fading, an accurate approximation is proposed for the distribution of the packet transmission time of $K$-bit information packets using rateless codes. The two types of channel coding schemes are compared by evaluating the typical user and per-user success probability and the rate. Based o…
Recent study predicts that by 2020 up to 50 billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet, straining the capacity of wireless network that has already been overloaded with data-hungry mobile applications, such as high-definition video streaming and virtual reality(VR)/augmented reality(AR). How to accommodate the demand for both massive scale of IoT devices and high-speed cellular services in the physically limited spectrum without significantly increasing the operational and infrastructure costs is one of the main challenges for operators. In this article, we introduce a new multi-ope…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as one of the promising technologies to enhance the spectral efficiency and throughput for the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G cellular networks. Alternatively, Coordinated multi-point transmission and reception (CoMP) improves the cell edge users' coverage. Thus, CoMP and NOMA can be used together to improve the overall coverage and throughput of the users. However, user grouping and pairing for CoMP-NOMA-based cellular networks have not been suitably studied in the existing literature. Motivated by this, we propose a user grouping…
In the near future, it is envisioned that cellular networks will have to cope with extensive Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Therefore, a required feature of cellular IoT will be the capability to serve simultaneously a large number of devices with heterogeneous demands and qualities of Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT). In this paper, we focus on an overloaded Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC) with two groups of CSIT qualities, namely one group of users (representative of high-end devices) for which the transmitter has partial knowledge of the CSI,…
We consider a dense urban cellular network where the base stations (BSs) are stacked vertically as well as extending infinitely in the horizontal plane, resulting in a greater than two dimensional (2D) deployment. Using a dual-slope path loss model that is well supported empirically, we extend recent 2D coverage probability and potential throughput results to 3 dimensions. We prove that the "critical close-in path loss exponent" $α_0$ where SINR eventually decays to zero is equal to the dimensionality $d$, i.e. $α_0 \leq 3$ results in an eventual SINR of 0 in a 3D network. We also show that th…
This paper studies cooperative schemes for the inter-cell interference control in orthogonal-frequency-divisionmultiple- access (OFDMA) cellular systems. The downlink transmission in a simplified two-cell system is examined, where both cells simultaneously access the same frequency band using OFDMA. The joint power and subcarrier allocation over the two cells is investigated for maximizing their sum throughput with both centralized and decentralized implementations. Particularly, the decentralized allocation is achieved via a new cooperative interference control approach, whereby the two cells…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) exploits the potential of the power domain to enhance the connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to time-varying communication channels, dynamic user clustering is a promising method to increase the throughput of NOMA-IoT networks. This paper develops an intelligent resource allocation scheme for uplink NOMA-IoT communications. To maximise the average performance of sum rates, this work designs an efficient optimization approach based on two reinforcement learning algorithms, namely deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and SARSA-learning. For ligh…
In pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the use of short packets is expected to meet the stringent latency requirement in ultra-reliable low-latency communications; however, the incurred security issues and the impact of finite blocklength coding on the physical-layer security have not been well understood. This paper comprehensively investigates the performance of secure short-packet communications in a mission-critical IoT system with an external multi-antenna eavesdropper. An analytical framework is proposed to approximate the average achievable secrecy throughput of the system …
Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission is an effective means of improving network throughput in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). However, its performance is seriously weakened if imperfect coordination happens between base stations (BSs). Many prior CoMP works do not consider inter-cell overhead message delays such that a seemingly astonishing CoMP throughput gain is attained. In this paper, the quantization error and delay that actually exist in overhead messages was modeled and we developed a much tractable SIR model based on the stochastic geometry framework. We proposed adap…
This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled two-user interference channel for wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs), in which two UAVs wirelessly charge two low-power Internet-of-things (IoT)-devices on the ground and collect information from them. We consider two scenarios when both UAVs cooperate in energy transmission and/or information reception via interference coordination and coordinated multi-point (CoMP), respectively. For both scenarios, the UAVs' controllable mobility is exploited via trajectory design to not only enhance the wireless power transfer (WPT) e…
In this paper, we investigate and analyze energy recycling for a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided wireless-powered communication network. As opposed to the existing works where the energy harvested by Internet of things (IoT) devices only come from the power station, IoT devices are also allowed to recycle energy from other IoT devices. In particular, we propose group switching- and user switching-based protocols with time-division multiple access to evaluate the impact of energy recycling on system performance. Two different optimization problems are respectively formulated for …
This paper develops and evaluates an accumulate-then-transmit framework for multi-user scheduling in a full-duplex (FD) wireless-powered Internet-of-Things system, consisting of multiple energy harvesting (EH) IoT devices (IoDs) and one FD hybrid access point (HAP). All IoDs have no embedded energy supply and thus need to perform EH before transmitting their data to the HAP. Thanks to its FD capability, the HAP can simultaneously receive data uplink and broadcast energy-bearing signals downlink to charge IoDs. The instantaneous channel information is assumed unavailable throughout this paper. …
Distance-based attenuation is a critical aspect of wireless communications. As opposed to the ubiquitous power-law path loss model, this paper proposes a stretched exponential path loss model that is suitable for short-range communication. In this model, the signal power attenuates over a distance $r$ as $e^{-αr^β}$, where $α,β$ are tunable parameters. Using experimental propagation measurements, we show that the proposed model is accurate for short to moderate distances in the range $r \in (5,300)$ meters and so is a suitable model for dense and ultradense networks. We integrate this path los…
This paper investigates a full-duplex orthogonal-frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) based multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-enabled wireless-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, a swarm of UAVs is first deployed in three dimensions (3D) to simultaneously charge all devices, i.e., a downlink (DL) charging period, and then flies to new locations within this area to collect information from scheduled devices in several epochs via OFDMA due to potential limited number of channels available in Narrow Band IoT, i.e., an uplink (UL) communication period. To maximiz…
The past few years have witnessed a tremendous increase on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civilian applications, which call for high-performance communication between UAVs and their ground clients, especially when they are densely deployed. To achieve this goal, cellular base stations (BSs) can be leveraged to provide a new and promising solution to support massive UAV communications simultaneously in a cost-effective way. However, different from terrestrial communication channels, UAV-to-BS channels are usually dominated by the light-of-sight (LoS) link, which aggravates the co…
In this paper, we adopt a cross layer design approach for analyzing the throughput-delay tradeoff of the multicast channel in a single cell system. To illustrate the main ideas, we start with the single group case, i.e., pure multicast, where a common information stream is requested by all the users. We consider three classes of scheduling algorithms with progressively increasing complexity. The first class strives for minimum complexity by resorting to a static scheduling strategy along with memoryless decoding. Our analysis for this class of scheduling algorithms reveals the existence of a s…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is large-scale by nature. This is not only manifested by the large number of connected devices, but also by the high volumes of traffic that must be accommodated. Cellular networks are indeed a natural candidate for the data tsunami the IoT is expected to generate in conjunction with legacy human-type traffic. However, the random access process for scheduling request represents a major bottleneck to support IoT via LTE cellular networks. Accordingly, this paper develops a mathematical framework to model and study the random access channel (RACH) scalability to acco…
This paper considers an ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) network in which a full-duplex access point (FAP) simultaneously transmits downlink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals to its legacy user (LU) and receives uplink signals backscattered from multiple BDs in a time-division-multiple-access manner. To maximize the system throughput and ensure fairness, we aim to maximize the minimum throughput among all BDs by jointly optimizing the backscatter time and reflection coefficients of the BDs, and the FAP's subcarrier power allocation, subject to the LU's throughpu…
The heterogeneous cellular network (HCN) is a promising approach to the deployment of 5G cellular networks. This paper comprehensively studies physical layer security in a multi-tier HCN where base stations (BSs), authorized users and eavesdroppers are all randomly located. We first propose an access threshold based secrecy mobile association policy that associates each user with the BS providing the maximum \emph{truncated average received signal power} beyond a threshold. Under the proposed policy, we investigate the connection probability and secrecy probability of a randomly located user, …
UAV-based base station (UBS) has played an important role in the air-ground integration network due to its high flexibility and nice air-ground wireless channels. Especially in Internet of Things (IoT) services, UBS can provide an efficient way for data collection from the IoT devices. However, due to the continuous mobility of UBS, the communication durations of devices in different locations with the UBS are not only time-limited, but also vary from each other. Therefore, it is a challenging task to analyze the throughput performance of the UAV-based IoT network. Accordingly, in this paper, …
In this paper, we design an efficient deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve and predict the performance of energy harvesting (EH) short-packet communications in multi-hop cognitive Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. Specifically, we propose a Sum-EH scheme that allows IoT nodes to harvest energy from either a power beacon or primary transmitters to improve not only packet transmissions but also energy harvesting capabilities. We then build a novel deep CNN framework with feature enhancement-collection blocks based on the proposed Sum-EH scheme to simultaneously estimate the block …
Cellular network performance can significantly benefit from direct device-to-device (D2D) communication, but interference from cochannel D2D communication limits the performance gain. In hybrid networks consisting of D2D and cellular links, finding the optimal interference management is challenging. In particular, we show that the problem of maximizing network throughput while guaranteeing predefined service levels to cellular users is non- convex and hence intractable. Instead, we adopt a distributed approach that is computationally extremely efficient, and requires minimal coordination, comm…
In conventional terrestrial cellular networks, mobile terminals (MTs) at the cell edge often pose a performance bottleneck due to their long distances from the serving ground base station (GBS), especially in hotspot period when the GBS is heavily loaded. This paper proposes a new hybrid network architecture by leveraging the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an aerial mobile base station, which flies cyclically along the cell edge to offload data traffic for cell-edge MTs. We aim to maximize the minimum throughput of all MTs by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory, bandwidth allocati…
In this paper, we design a novel high-throughput random access scheme for an indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) massive Internet of Things (IoT) scenario. Due to the large density of both IoT devices and OWC access points (APs), we base the proposed scheme on multi-receiver coded slotted ALOHA. In this scenario, collisions at APs are resolved by a centralized interference cancellation decoder that may exploit both spatial and temporal diversity. By applying adaptive control of each OWC AP field of view (FOV), the proposed system is able to dynamically adapt to different IoT device act…
In heterogeneous cellular scenarios with macrocells, femtocells or picocells users may suffer from significant co-channel cross-tier interference. To manage this interference 3GPP introduced almost blank subframe (ABSF), a subframe in which the interferer tier is not allowed to transmit data. Vulnerable users thus get a chance to be scheduled in ABSFs with reduced cross-tier interference. We analyze downlink scenarios using stochastic geometry and formulate a condition for the required number of ABSFs based on base station placement statistics and user throughput requirement. The result is a s…
