On the Performance of Compressed Interference Forwarding for Uplink Base Station Cooperation

The capacity of today's cellular mobile communications systems is mainly limited by inter-cell interference. Multi-cell joint transmission or joint detection schemes are means to overcome this limitation and to actively exploit signal propagation across cell borders rather than treating it as noise. In the cellular uplink, messages of multiple terminals can be detected jointly by cooperating base stations, a concept which has shown to significantly increase the efficiency of spectrum usage. Particularly, the performance of cell-edge users and thus system fairness is improved. A major drawback of multi-cell signal processing is the additional backhaul data rate that is required to exchange information among cooperating base stations. In this paper, we examine the performance of different base station cooperation schemes from an information theoretic point of view. The main contribution is the examination of a novel cooperation scheme that is based on the exchange of compressed transmit signals that are known at a base station after the decoding of a message in a very general system model.