MIMO precoding and mode adaptation in femtocellular systems

Hierarchical femtocellular architectures have become popular recently because of their potential to provide increased coverage and capacity in cellular systems. However, introduction of femtocells might reduce the overlay macrocellular system performance due to increased interference caused to macrocellular users. In this article, two MIMO precoding techniques are considered at the femtocellular base stations (FBSs) to control the interference to the macrocellular users: precoding matrix index (PMI), and least interference (LI). With MIMO precoding, the limited CSI at the transmitter is the index of the precoder chosen from the codebook fed back by the receiver. The LI technique can be employed at the FBSs to maximize the macrocellular throughput, but it also results in significant reduction in femtocellular throughput. The PMI approach can maximize the signal power at a desired receiver, with minimal feedback. In this article, we develop algorithms that adapt at the FBSs between the LI and PMI schemes to increase both the macrocellular and femtocellular throughputs. We show that allowing for mode adaptation at each FBS improves the system performance when compared with using the same mode across the system, and a simple binary choice at each FBS can nearly achieve the optimum mode-adaptation performance. Analysis and simulation results in a multicell environment are presented to illustrate the improvement in system performance with the proposed techniques.