• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.1387-1401
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• 2016

When a closed access policy in which only an authorized user is allowed to access to a given base station (BS) has been employed in heterogeneous cellular networks, a macro-cell user is used to experience strong cross-tier interference from its adjacent small-cell BSs to which the user is not allowed to access. To mitigate this problem, it has been proposed that a small-cell BS employs a beamforming vector which is orthogonal to the channel of the victim user. However, this technique requires considerable mutual exchange of information among the macro-cell BS, the macro-cell user, and the small-cell BS. In this paper, we propose a cognitive beamforming scheme, in which a small-cell BS employs the beamforming orthogonal to the victim users' channel without any explicit mutual information exchange. Particularly, the small-cell BS finds small- and macro-cell users experiencing the co-tier and cross-tier interferences from it, respectively. Then, it employs a beamforming which is orthogonal to the victim users' channels to mitigate the co-tier and cross-tier interferences. Using the system-level simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively mitigates the cross-tier interference problem.