A stochastic examination of the interference in heterogeneous radio access networks

Networks of the future have been forecast as being increasingly heterogeneous. Heterogeneous networks, in general, display a high degree of spatial randomness which is a result of the deployment of a variety of smaller base stations (BSs) along with macro BSs wherever and whenever it is deemed necessary. An important aspect of analyzing, improving, and deploying heterogeneous networks involves understanding the interference that users in such a network encounter. This paper documents a part of our work towards such an analysis of the efficiency of heterogeneous networks. The work delineated in this paper discerns the interference experienced in a heterogeneous network consisting of macro- and micro- BSs which are considered to be points of a Poisson cluster process in the Euclidean plane. This paper has two main contributions: the first is an expression for the generating functional of the interference (akin to its density function) and the second is a proof that shows that the interference in any given area can be approximated to be completely described by a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and a variance that is dependent on the number of BSs in the area, along with the functionals that represent the path-loss, transmit power, fading, etc. which are ascribed to each BS.