At present, operators address the explosive growth of mobile data demand bydensification of the cellular network so as to reduce the transmitter-receiverdistance and to achieve higher spectral efficiency. Due to such networkdensification and the intense proliferation of wireless devices, modernwireless networks are interference-limited, which motivates the use ofinterference mitigation and coordination techniques. In this work, we develop astatistical framework to evaluate the performance of multi-tier heterogeneousnetworks with successive interference cancellation (SIC) capabilities,accounting for the computational complexity of the cancellation scheme andrelevant network related parameters such as random location of the accesspoints (APs) and mobile users, and the characteristics of the wirelesspropagation channel. We explicitly model the consecutive events of cancelinginterferers and we derive the success probability to cancel the n-th strongestsignal and to decode the signal of interest after n cancellations. When usersare connected to the AP which provides the maximum average received signalpower, the analysis indicates that the performance gains of SIC diminishquickly with n and the benefits are modest for realistic values of thesignal-to-interference ratio (SIR). We extend the statistical model to includeseveral association policies where distinct gains of SIC are expected: (i)minimum load association, (ii) maxi- mum instantaneous SIR association, and(iii) range expansion. Numerical results show the effectiveness of SIC for theconsidered association policies. This work deepens the understanding of SIC bydefining the achievable gains for different association policies in multi-tierheterogeneous networks.
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