Interference mitigation for broadcast in hierarchical cell structure networks: Transmission strategy and area spectral efficiency

In this paper, a hierarchical cell structure (HCS) is considered, where an access point (AP) broadcasts to local nodes (LNs) over orthogonal frequency subbands within a local cell located in a macrocell. Since the local cell shares the spectrum licensed to the macrocell, a given LN is interfered with by the macrocell user (MU)'s transmissions over the same subband. To improve the performance of the AP's broadcast service, a novel transmission strategy is proposed to mitigate the interference from the MU to the LN while achieving diversity gain. For the purpose of performance evaluation, the ergodic capacity of the proposed scheme is quantified, and the corresponding closed-form expression is obtained. By comparing with the traditional transmission scheme, which suffers from MU's interference, illustrative numerical results substantiate that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than the traditional scheme as the MU-LN mean channel power gain is larger than half of the AP-LN mean channel power gain. Subsequently, we develop an optimized network design by maximizing the area spectral efficiency (ASE) of the AP's broadcast in the local cell.