Iterative Inter-Cell Interference Cancellation Receiver for LDPC-Coded MIMO Systems

In an ultra-dense cellular system, users at the cell-edge are susceptible to inter-cell interference (ICI) because of the overlap of the spectrum. To combat ICI, this paper investigates two iterative ICI cancellation approaches for low-density parity-check-coded multiple-input multiple-output systems. One approach includes separate signal and interference detectors; the other one employs a joint detector for both the desired signal and interference. The joint-detector approach achieves a comparable error-rate performance with only half the computational complexity when compared to the separate-detector counterpart. An iterative ICI cancellation receiver using the joint detector is proposed and implemented. Its hardware efficiency is significantly enhanced by leveraging an efficient coordinate rotation digital computer based processing array, an adaptive input-range scaling scheme, and an area-efficient log-likelihood ratio calculator. The iterative ICI cancellation receiver is flexible enough to support multiple modulations of up to 256-QAM. The maximum gross throughput is 1.24 Gb/s for a 4x4 256-QAM configuration in a 40-nm CMOS technology. The proposed iterative receiver outperforms the current state-of-the-art works in both the throughput-to-area ratio and the normalized energy metrics, despite the added ICI capability.