Cooperation-based Interference Mitigation in Heterogeneous Cloud Radio Access Networks

In this paper, we propose a cooperation framework in heterogeneous cloud radio access networks (H-CRANs) to mitigate inter-tier interference. Specifically, small cell remote radio head (S-RRH) acts as the cognitive relay for multiple macrocell users (MUEs) which are primary users, and obtains a fraction of time slot from multiple MUEs as a reward. Through the cooperation, the S-RRHs can obtain extra spectrum resource for serving secondary users-small cell users (SUEs), while the MUEs can improve their transmission rates. Moreover, the intertier interference between macrocell networks and small cell networks can be mitigated via cooperation. The cooperation problem is formulated as a binary integer programming problem which is NP-hard. To solve this problem, we transform it to an equivalent many-to-one matching problem. Then, we achieve the near optimal solution by proposing a two-sided cooperator selection algorithm, which takes the benefits of both S-RRHs and MUEs into consideration. Simulation results show that the performance of the macrocell networks as well as small cell networks can be improved by adopting the proposed scheme, and the cooperator selection result is stable and close to the optimal solution.