Dynamic Small Cell Clustering and Non-Cooperative Game-Based Precoding Design for Two-Tier Heterogeneous Networks With Massive MIMO

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic small cell (SC) clustering strategy and their precoding design problem for interference coordination in two-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with massive MIMO (mMIMO). To reduce interference among different SCs, an interference graph-based dynamic SC clustering scheme is proposed. Based on this, we formulate an optimization problem as design precoding weights at macro base station (MBS) and clustered SCs for maximizing the downlink sum rate of SC users (SUs) subject to the power constraint of each SC BS (SBS), while mitigating inter-cluster, eliminating inter-tier, intra-cluster and multi-macro user (MU) interference. To eliminate the inter-tier and multi-MU interference simultaneously, we propose a clustered SC block diagonalization precoding scheme for the MBS. Next, each SU’s precoding vector at clustered SCs is designed as the product of the following two parts. The first part is designed with singular value decomposition to remove the intra-cluster interference. The second part is designed to coordinate the inter-cluster interference for maximizing the downlink sum rate of SUs, which is a non-convex optimization problem and difficult to solve directly. A non-cooperative game-based distributed algorithm is proposed to obtain a suboptimal solution. Meanwhile, we prove the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium for the formed game. Finally, simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.