Multi User Inter Cell Interference Alignment in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

In this contribution we address the issue of interference management in co-channel heterogeneous cellular network. Interference alignment is one of the technique that was proposed to manage the interference in homogeneous network. However, unlike single tier macro cellular network, two tier co-channel heterogeneous cellular network exhibits special interference characteristics. This stems due to the transmit power mismatch in macro and pico layers. Hence it is important to analyse the impact of these characteristics on interference alignment based interference management. For this purpose, we evaluate the performance of multi user inter cell interference alignment based transmit precoding and compare it with the state of the art non-alignment based precoding schemes. We find out that alignment based scheme is more robust to the extra tier interference than its non-alignment based counterparts. Moreover, it provides higher gains in achievable throughput per macro coverage area with out any backhaul coordination and delay constraints.