Uplink Interference Management for Coexisting MIMO Femtocell and Macrocell Networks: An Interference Alignment Approach

This paper considers uplink interference management for two-tier cellular systems by way of Interference Alignment (IA). In order to manage the uplink interference caused by macrocell users at the femtocell base stations (FBS), cooperation between macrocell users with the closest femtocell base stations is proposed with the goal of aligning the received signals of macrocell users in the same subspace at multiple FBSs. The precoder design for macrocell users is accomplished using successive semidefinite programming relaxations. The proposed solution aims to minimize the cross-tier interference leaked to the femtocells while providing the macrocell users with a minimum received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) at the macrocell base station (MBS). Intra-tier femtocell interference is dealt with minimum mean squared error (MMSE) interference suppression. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed two-tier interference management approach improves the performance of femtocell users, while maintaining the desired quality of the communication channel of macrocell users.