Low Complexity Base Station Cooperation in Cellular Networks with Blockages

Motivated by the effects of buildings/obstacles on the performance of high frequency cellular networks, this paper deals with the base station (BS) cooperation in heterogeneous cellular networks with blockages. Our main focus is a joint transmission scenario, where an ideal backhaul network allows a set of randomly located BSs belonging to different network tiers, to cooperate and jointly transmit data. By using concepts from random shape theory, we model the spatial randomness as well as the main characteristics of the blockages (e.g., size, orientation, etc). The outage probability performance of the system is analyzed for two low complexity transmission techniques with different channel state information requirements by using stochastic geometry tools. Our results show that the spatial diversity associated with the BS cooperation is an efficient technique to overcome the degradation effects of blockages and ensure connectivity.