Cross-Tier Interference-Aware Scheduling for Heterogeneous Uplink Transmission

Heterogeneous deployment comprising overlays macrocell and small cells is a promising solution to enhance both system capacity and coverage. Nevertheless, the performance of heterogeneous networks uplink is severely degraded due by cross-layer interference, especially the interference that small cell suffers from the proximate macro UEs (MUEs). In this paper, we propose a Cross-Tier Interference-Aware (CTIA) scheduling scheme which exploits scheduling coordination and small cell spacial degree of freedom to mitigate the uplink interference. The system level simulations show that substantial throughput gains can be achieved with the proposed CTIA scheme and practical receivers. It is also suggested to properly balance between the capacity improvement achieved by the proposed method and the backhaul overhead consumption, which can be implemented by adapting the cooperating set size with a system-defined parameter.