Analysis of Interference Cancellation in mmWave Cellular Systems

In this research, WNCG visiting graduate student Amir Jafari, WNCG graduate student Jeonghun Park and WNCG professor Robert Heath address the benefits of interference cancellation in millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular systems. Considering a multiple antenna communications system with transmitting and receiving antennas, the receiving antennas can either be exploited to decode data streams in order to achieve spatial multiplexing, or alternatively the receiving antennas can be used to cancel the interference. These two scenarios refer to the extremes of maximum ratio combining and zero forcing, respectively. In order to enhance the system performance and maximize the transmission capacity, the WNCG team suggests there must be a tradeoff between spatial multiplexing and interference cancellation. The researchers consider a partial zero forcing receiver that uses some of its spatial receive degrees of freedom to cancel the interference from a set of non-serving base stations while the remaining ones are used to decode the transmitted data streams. Consequently, this research helps derive the optimal number of data streams to be transmitted as well as the optimal spatial receive degrees of freedom for interference cancellation.