The asymptotic limits of interference in multicell networks with channel aware scheduling

Interference is emerging as a fundamental bottleneck in many important wireless communication scenarios, including dense cellular networks and cognitive networks with spectrum sharing by multiple service providers. Although multiple-antenna signal processing is known to offer useful degrees of freedom to cancel interference, extreme-value theoretic analysis recently showed that, even in the absence of multiple-antenna processing, the scaling law of the capacity in the number of users for a multi-cell network with and without inter-cell interference was asymptotically identical provided a simple signal to noise and interference ratio (SINR) maximizing scheduler is exploited. This suggests that scheduling can help reduce inter-cell interference substantially, thus possibly limiting the need for multiple-antenna processing. However, the convergence limits of interference after scheduling in a multi-cell setting are not yet identified. In this paper1 we analyze such limits theoretically. We consider channel statistics under Rayleigh fading with equal path loss for all users or with unequal path loss. We uncover two surprisingly different behaviors for such systems. For the equal path loss case, we show that scheduling alone can cause the residual interference to converge to zero for large number of users. With unequal path loss however, the interference power is shown to converge in average to a nonzero constant. Simulations back our findings.