Abstract: In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), it is desirable to offload users from macro cells to small cells to achieve load balancing. However, the offloaded users suffer a strong inter-tier interference. To guarantee the performance of the offloaded users, the interference from macro cells should be carefully managed. In this paper, we jointly optimize load balancing and interference coordination in multi-antenna HetNets. Different from previous works, instead of almost blank subframes (ABS) on which the macro cells waste time resource, the macro cells suppress the interference to the offloaded users by zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) on interference nulling subframes (INS). Considering user association cannot be conduct frequently, we derive the long-term throughput of users over Rayleigh fading channels while previous works focused on instantaneous rate. From the perspective of the spectrum efficiency and user fairness, we formulate a long-term network-wide utility maximization problem. By decomposing the problem into two subproblems, we propose an efficient joint load balancing and interference coordination strategy. Simulation results show that our proposal can achieve good system performance gains over counterparts in term of the network utility, cell edge throughput and average throughput.

Key words: heterogeneous networks, multi-antenna, load balancing, interference coordination, zero-forcing beamforming