Effectiveness of successive interference cancellation and association policies for heterogeneous wireless networks

The densification of the network infrastructure is a possible solution to meet the explosive growth of mobile data demand. In the resulting interference-limited networks, interference management techniques are of interest to increase the spectral efficiency. Successive interference cancellation (SIC) provides modest gains when users are connected to the access point (AP) which provides the maximum average received signal power. In this paper, we focus on alternative association policies where SIC gives rise to a substantial performance gain. Specifically, we present a probabilistic framework to evaluate the performance of heterogeneous networks with SIC capabilities considering the minimum load association policy and range expansion. Numerical results show the effectiveness of SIC for these association policies.