Adaptive Spatial Intercell Interference Cancellation in Multicell Wireless Networks

Downlink spatial intercell interference cancellation (ICIC) is considered for mitigating other-cell interference using multiple transmit antennas. A principle question we explore is whether it is better to do ICIC or simply standard single-cell beamforming. We explore this question analytically and show that beamforming is preferred for all users when the edge SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) is low (< 0 dB), and ICIC is preferred when the edge SNR is high (> 10 dB), for example in an urban setting. At medium SNR, a proposed adaptive strategy, where multiple base stations jointly select transmission strategies based on the user location, outperforms both while requiring a lower feedback rate than the pure ICIC approach. The employed metric is sum rate, which is normally a dubious metric for cellular systems, but surprisingly we show that even with this reward function the adaptive strategy also improves fairness. When the channel information is provided by limited feedback, the impact of the induced quantization error is also investigated. The analysis provides insights on the feedback design, and it is shown that ICIC with well-designed feedback strategies still provides significant throughput gain.