User-centric interference nulling in downlink multi-antenna heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) have strong interference due to spectrum reuse. This affects the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of each user, and hence is one of the limiting factors of network performance. However, in previous works, interference management approaches in HetNets are mainly based on interference level, and thus cannot effectively utilize the limited resource to improve network performance. In this paper, we propose a user-centric interference nulling (IN) scheme in downlink two-tier HetNets to improve network performance by improving each user's SIR. This scheme has three design parameters: the maximum degree of freedom for IN (i.e., maximum IN DoF), and the IN thresholds for the macro and pico users, respectively. Using tools from stochastic geometry, we first obtain a tractable expression of the coverage (equivalently outage) probability. Then, we characterize the asymptotic behavior of the outage probability in the high reliability regime. The asymptotic results show that the maximum IN DoF can affect the order gain of the asymptotic outage probability, while the IN thresholds only affect the coefficient of the asymptotic outage probability. Moreover, we show that the IN scheme can linearly improve the outage performance, and characterize the optimal maximum IN DoF which minimizes the asymptotic outage probability.