Transmission Scheme and Performance Analysis of Multi-Cell Decoupled Heterogeneous Networks

Although uplink (UL) downlink (DL) decoupling (DUDe) brings significant gains in the UL throughput of decoupled user equipments (DeUEs) in heterogeneous networks, channel estimation and DL performance of DeUEs are worse than the coupled UEs due to the DUDe property and the cell edge effect. To address these fundamental problems, we propose a transmission scheme with data-aided (DA) minimum mean square error (MMSE) channel estimator and zero-forcing (ZF) interference nulling (IN) precoding for a two-tier multi-cell HetNet with DUDe. We first present a method to estimate the bit error rate (BER) of UL data, then, derive the form of DA MMSE estimator, which utilizes decoded UL data, estimated BER and known UL training sequences to jointly estimate the DL channels of DeUEs. ZF IN precoding uses the estimated channels of DeUEs to cancel the nearest DL interference without any cooperation and message transmission. Also, we derive a tight approximation to the achievable DL rate of DeUEs and analyze the benefits of the DA estimator and ZF IN precoding. Our simulations show that DA MMSE estimator outperforms the conventional MMSE counterpart, while the proposed scheme improves the DL performance of both DeUEs and macro UEs, though the rate gain may be degraded by pilot contamination and inter-cell interference.