Closed-Form Approximations for Coverage Probability of Multistream MIMO-ZFBF Receivers in HetNets

Abstract

The evaluation of the coverage probability of multistream multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications in HetNets subject to noise, fading, and intercell interference is undoubtedly intricate. Unfortunately, the current literature misses its comprehensive evaluation, as the effects of noise and cross-stream correlation are often overlooked. Furthermore, computationally friendly expressions of the coverage probability allowing engineering insights and adaptive system design are lacking. For multistream MIMO zero-forcing beamforming, in this paper we tackle these issues by considering scenarios where a receiver is in the coverage if all of its data-streams are successfully decoded. Assuming the max signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) cell association (CA), we adopt the stochastic geometry tools to provide an upper bound and an easy-to-compute closed-form lower bound on the coverage probability, while their accuracies are confirmed against extensive simulations. Our contributions are as follows. We prove that full correlation of data streams of a given link slightly reduces the coverage performance. We show that from a coverage probability perspective, the single stream communication is preferable. We exploit our analysis to explore several pertinent design issues, which have not fully discussed in the literature. Our results demonstrate tradeoffs between densification and multiplexing gains. We, further, see that by appropriately designating feedback channel with modest capacity 8 bits per frame per user, the spatial throughput grows by nearly 180 $\%$ over the conventional 1-bit feedback scenario. Finally, We present important extensions of our analysis to underlay spectrum sharing, practical aspects of the max-SINR CA, and a nonhomogeneous path loss environment.