Effect of Unpredictable Interference on MU-MIMO Systems in HetNet

In this paper, we investigate the outage probability of a multiuser multiple-input multipleoutput (MU-MIMO) system in the heterogeneous network (HetNet) in the presence of unpredictable interference (UI) from coexisting ad hoc systems. In order to achieve multiuser diversity gain, the MU-MIMO system requires feedback carrying the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) from all active users to the base station. However, the coexisting ad hoc systems in HetNet can unpredictably initiate their data transmission during the SINR feedback duration. This unpredictable behavior by the coexisting ad hoc systems causes a mismatch between the measured SINR and the instantaneous SINR. In order to investigate the performance of the MU-MIMO system in HetNets, we first categorize the interferences into predictable interference and UI. Based on this categorization, we analyze the outage probability of an MU-MIMO system using a max-SINR scheduler. The theoretical analyses show that the MU-MIMO system cannot achieve the maximum diversity gain, since the UI from the coexisting systems causes beam selection mismatch. Additionally, we show that reducing the interval between the measurement and data transmission prevents performance degradation by reducing the effect of the unpredictable behavior of the coexisting ad hoc systems.