Enhancing Downlink Transmission in MIMO HetNet With Wireless Backhaul

Abstract

We propose a transmission scheme that exploits the spatial degrees of freedom from large antenna arrays to maximize the downlink sum-rate of user equipment (UE) in a heterogeneous network. Our scheme incorporates the design of 1) a new precoder for the millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless backhaul; and 2) an enhanced small cell range expansion method for data link transmission. Aside from the advantage of lower implementation and computational complexity, the wireless backhaul precoder can simultaneously support multiple small access points with multi-streams. Under the constraint of wireless backhaul capacity, a downlink cooperation precoding algorithm is proposed to suppress the interference caused by small cell range expansion. Simulation results show that the proposed precoder in backhaul link can use a small number of radio frequency (RF) chains to achieve the sum-rate performance that approaches the one under traditional block diagonalization precoder, which requires the number of the RF chains to be comparable with that of antenna elements. Moreover, we give a lower bound for the overall UE sum-rate of the downlink cooperation precoding algorithm.