Proactive Uplink Interference Mitigation in HetNets Stressed by Uniformly Distributed Wideband Jammers

In heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets), densification of small base stations (SBSs) in the macro base station (MBS) coverage region leads to improved network coverage and capacity. However, this improvement is at the cost of inter-cell interference (ICI) due to the high MBS transmit power. The situation deteriorates further when uniformly deployed wideband jammers (WBJs) to initiate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are present. With sufficient knowledge about the network parameters, WBJs produce substantial jammer interference (JI) by transmitting unwanted energy in the legitimate band. Such jamming attacks can cause significant JI in the UL communications of MBS edge users (M-EUs) due to i) low uplink (UL) transmit power of user equipment (UE) and ii) longer distances of M-EUs. As a result of ICI and JI, M-EUs are severely affected and go off the coverage due to a low received signal-to-interference ratio (SIR). Hence, to mitigate both ICI and JI, we use a proactive resource allocation scheme known as reverse frequency allocation (RFA). The results indicate that although ICI and JI significantly degrade network performance, RFA employment leads to improved SIR due to effective ICI and JI mitigation.