Cell-edge inversion by interference cancellation for downlink cellular systems

We consider a novel method to improve the down-link data rate of cell-edge users in a cellular system, which is particularly well-suited for Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). The receivers are assumed to be able to cancel interference by simultaneously processing at most two codewords. Receivers may be served by either the closest cell or a neighboring cell; in the latter case, the receiver cancels the interference from its own cell transmission, and receives the other-cell transmission without this interference. A distributed network utility optimization problem is formulated to exploit this possibility. In a HetNet simulation, where proportional fair network utility is maximized, we observe significant gains for cell-edge users, accompanied by a moderate gain for the network capacity.