A simple approach for the suppression of Rician interference in a relay backhaul using limited feedback

Abstract The benefits of Decode and Forward (DF) relaying span from deployment flexibility to coverage extension and improved capacity distribution in the network. Accordingly, relaying has become an integral part of the modern radio access network standards. Besides the evident benefits of DF relaying, the fact is that it uses part of the valuable radio access resources for the communication between network elements. Thus, the amount of radio resources allocated to the Relay Link (RL) between serving Donor Base Station (DBS) and the Relay Node (RN) should be minimised. This easily makes the RL a bottleneck in conventional two-hop infrastructure relaying. Furthermore, current mobile systems apply universal frequency reuse in macrocell deployments where macrocell BS’s serve RN’s as well. As a result, RL’s may suffer from severe interference. We propose a practical limited feedback approach that can be used to simultaneously improve the signal strength and to suppress the interference in the RL. To that end, we deduce analytical formulae for the distribution of the Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) in the RL by assuming Rice and Rayleigh fading combinations in desired and interfering links. Furthermore, we compute two-hop end-to-end (e2e) outage probabilities for different interference and limited feedback scenarios. Results show that especially in Rice fading environment, large performance gains can be obtained with only few bits feedback in case where RL has scarce radio resources and suffers from dominant interferer. This makes the proposed method very feasible for the infrastructure relaying where RN’s can be placed either in the rooftop level or other locations that provide a line of sight towards macro BS’s.