  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 multipleantenna (MIMO) 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 MIMO 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 are shown to converge in average to a nonzero
constant. Simulations back our findings.
