Uplink cooperation in wireless networks with NICE processing

Abstract

There has been a lot of recent interest in the potential of inter-base station cooperation techniques to manage excessive out-of-cell interference in evolving cellular networks. In this paper, we propose and describe a signal processing approach based on a novel Network Interference Cancellation Engine (NICE), which opportunistically cancels dominant out-of-cell interference by exchanging decoded dominant interferer data among cooperating cells and reconstructing interfering signals. Simulation results with NICE processing in cellular networks show that substantial improvements in signal-to-interferenceplus-noise ratio may be achieved over current non-cooperative multi-antenna receiver processing techniques while allowing backhaul overhead to be reduced by approximately between one and two orders of magnitude relative to joint processing techniques employing the exchange of complex-valued received signal samples.