Transmission energy consumption in MIMO systems under inter-cell interference

We investigate the base station (BS) downlink transmission energy for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system operating under an inter-cell interference environment with the receiver equipped with interference cancellation (IC) capability. It is demonstrated that, besides the number of antennas, receiver IC techniques can have an influence on the required BS transmission energy of a MIMO communication system. Specifically, the choice of receiver IC technique impacts the transmission energy more when the number of receive antennas is small. On the other hand, the transmission energy converges to a minimum value regardless of the type of receiver IC technique used when the number of receive antennas is large enough. We also show that inter-cell interference contributed by adjacent BSs have a detrimental effect on the performance of traditional IC techniques, causing the desired BS to use higher transmission energy to maintain the signal quality.