This paper focuses on interference issues arising in the downlink of a heterogeneous network (HetNet), where small cells are deployed within a macrocell. Interference scenario in a HetNet varies based on the type of small cell access modes, which can be classified as either closed subscriber group (CSG) or open subscriber group (OSG) modes. For these two types of modes, we propose hierarchical interference alignment (HIA) schemes, which successively determine beamforming matrices for small cell and macro base stations (BSs) by considering a HetNet environment in which the macro BS and small cell BSs have different numbers of transmit antennas. Unlike prior work on interference alignment (IA) for homogeneous networks, the proposed HIA schemes compute the beamforming matrices in closed-form and reduce the feedforward overhead through a hierarchical approach. By providing a tight outer bound of the degrees-of-freedom (DoF), we also investigate the optimality of the proposed HIA schemes with respect to the number of antennas without any time expansion. Furthermore, we propose a new optimization process to maximize the sum-rate performance of each cell while satisfying the IA conditions. The simulation results show that the proposed HIA schemes provide an additional DoF compared to the conventional interference coordination schemes using a time domain-based resource partitioning. Under multicell interference environments, the proposed schemes offer an approximately 100% improvement in throughput gain compared to the conventional coordinated beamforming schemes when the interference from coordinated BSs is significantly stronger than the remaining interference from uncoordinated BSs.Index Terms-Interference alignment, interference management, heterogeneous network, sum rate maximization.

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Spectrum sensing is a key enabling technology for cognitive radio. Since there is a tradeoff between the probability of missed detection and the probability of false alarm according to a value of sensing threshold, it is very important to determine the sensing threshold suitable for cognitive radio environments. In this paper, we propose a novel method to determine the sensing threshold in the cognitive radio system, in which the secondary user (SU) first decides its transmission power for the communication and then decides the sensing threshold for the coexistence with the primary user (PU). For the coexistence, the SU controls its sensing threshold adaptively according to its transmission power in order to guarantee the minimum decodable SINR for the primary receiver. The analysis results show that the adaptively controlled sensing threshold decreases both the missed detection and the false alarm simultaneously and so enables both SU and PU to coexist in the same channel without interfering each other.

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Interworking issues between Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) have become a great matter of interest as an increasing number of mobile internet users require broadband wireless access to IP services in the wide area. In this paper, we present a practical UMTS-WLAN interworking architecture based on 3GPP standards and propose a seamless handoff scheme that guarantees low delay and low packet loss during UMTS-WLAN handoff. For low handoff delay, the proposed handoff scheme performs pre-registration and pre-authentication processes before layer 2 handoff. Moreover, it uses packet buffering and forwarding functions in order to reduce packet loss during the handoff period. On the above basis, detailed signaling procedures are presented, together with system requirements when a mobile terminal moves from UMTS to WLAN and vice-versa. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme performs well with respect to signaling cost, handoff delay, and packet loss compared with conventional schemes.

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Data aggregation plays an important role to improve the transmission efficiency in wireless body area networks (WBANs); however, it inherently induces additional aggregation delay. Therefore, the effect of packet aggregation on WBAN applications, which are vulnerable to delay, must be analyzed rigorously. In this paper, we analyze the packet aggregation delay for multisource sensor data with an on-off traffic pattern in WBANs. Considering two operational parameters of the aggregation threshold and aggregation timer, we calculate the probability that a packet aggregation occurs during a unit time and then derive the average aggregation delay in closed-form. The analysis results show that the aggregation delay increases as the aggregation timer or aggregation threshold increases, but is bounded below a certain level according to the number of active sensors and their on-off traffic attribute. This implies that the data aggregation technique can maximize the transmission efficiency while satisfying a given delay requirement in the WBAN system.