Interference Management for K-Tier Networks Without CSIT Based on Reconfigurable Antennas

Heterogenous networks are mainly limited by interference. Nowadays, the advances in reconfigurable antennas allow us to implement blind interference alignment (BIA) schemes, which avoid the need for channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) while providing an increasing multiplexing gain, i.e., the achievable DoF, as the number of users increases. In this work, we propose a downlink transmission scheme based on BIA for managing the inter-tier interference in
$K$
-tier networks, referred to as tier BIA (tBIA). The tBIA scheme can be implemented considering that each tier employs any BIA scheme for managing the intracell and intercell interference. In this sense, considering proper BIA schemes applied to each tier, tBIA fully cancels all the sources of interference. After that, the DoF outer-bound for
$K$
-tier networks without CSIT is derived. It is shown that tBIA reaches this outer-bound. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that fully managing the inter-tier interference provides larger DoF in the whole network than turning off any tier with the aim of improving the achievable DoF in the remaining tiers. Simulation results show that the proposed tBIA scheme provides greater DoF and improves the user rates in comparison with other schemes without CSIT in multi-tier networks.