Space-Power Adaptive Interference Steering to Manage Interference in XIC

Abstract

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies, interference has become a key impediment in the improvement of network capacity. In practice, although dense deployment of network can effectively increase the spectrum efficiency, severe co-channel interference (CCI) is likely incurred, especially for mobile users in the overlapping areas of multiple access points, leading to serious deterioration of these users' spectral efficiency (SE). Interference steering (IS), emerging as a novel interference management (IM) scheme, can not only eliminate the impact of interference on the desired transmission, but also incur less power overhead than other IM methods. Although some works conducted flexible design of IS via power domain adaptation, the space domain flexibility has not been exploited. Moreover, existing IS works are mainly for the Z-interference channel (ZIC), while in practical use X-interference channel (XIC) is more common. To remedy the above deficiencies, this paper proposes a space-power adaptive interference steering (SPAIS) method in XIC. By adaptively adjusting the strength and spatial feature of the steering signal, SPAIS can not only effectively suppress interference imposed on the interfered receiver (Rx), but also make full use of the power of the steering signal, thus enhancing desired data transmission. Our in-depth simulation results show that compared to existing IM methods, SPAIS can significantly improve the users' SE performance.