Cooperative Transmission in Small Cell Networks Using Network Coding

Dense deployment of low-cost heterogeneous small cell base stations (SBSs) can accommodate the exploding demand for wireless spectrum, however, it increases the inter-cell interference. This letter investigates coding-based cooperative video transmission strategy in SBS networks, which allows the concurrent transmission of the interfering SBSs. We formulate an integer programming problem to increase the fairness of the users' receiving coded packets from SBSs by allowing overlapped transmissions. A heuristic solution is proposed by simplifying the structural properties of the problem with non-overlap phase and interfering phase. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed transmission strategies acquire significant performance gain compared with conventional transmission policies.