Performance Guarantees of Cellular Networks with Hardcore Regulation and Scheduling

Providing performance guarantees is one of the critical objectives of recent and future communication networks, toward which regulations, i.e., constraints on key system parameters, have played an indispensable role. This is the case for large wireless communication networks, where spatial regulations (e.g., constraints on intercell distance) have recently been shown, through a spatial network calculus, to be essential for establishing provable wireless link-level guarantees. In this work, we focus on performance guarantees for the downlink of cellular networks where we impose a hardcore (spatial) regulation on base station (BS) locations and evaluate how BS scheduling (which controls which BSs can transmit at a given time) impacts performance. Hardcore regulation is the simplest form of spatial regulation that enforces a minimal distance between any pair of transmitters in the network. Within this framework of spatial network calculus, we first provide an upper bound on the power of total interference for a spatially regulated cellular network, and then, identify the regimes where scheduling BSs yields better link-level rate guarantees compared to scenarios where base stations are always active. The hexagonal cellular network is analyzed as a special case. The results offer insights into what spatial regulations are needed, when to choose scheduling, and how to potentially reduce the network power consumption to provide a certain target performance guarantee.

💡 Research Summary

The paper investigates how spatial hardcore regulations combined with base‑station (BS) scheduling can provide provable downlink performance guarantees in large cellular networks. Using the framework of spatial network calculus, the authors first model BS locations as a stationary point process that satisfies a minimum‑distance (hard‑core) constraint: any two BSs must be separated by at least 2 H. They then introduce a more general (K, H_K)‑hard‑core regulation, where each BS receives a mark M(x)∈{1,…,K}. BSs sharing the same mark are required to keep a larger separation 2 H_K, which mathematically captures the effect of a periodic scheduling scheme that activates only one subset of BSs per time slot.

A key technical contribution is a new upper bound on the total interference seen by a typical user. By explicitly accounting for the exclusion region created both by the nearest‑BS association (a ball of radius d) and by the hard‑core rule (a ball of radius 2 H around the serving BS), the authors define a minimal interferer distance t = max(d, 2H − d). Lemma 2 shows that for any non‑increasing path‑loss function ℓ(·), the sum of ℓ over all interferers can be bounded by an integral that depends on t and H. This bound is strictly tighter than the one previously derived in