A Distributed Signal Processing Strategy for Uplink Multi-point Coordination

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) communication has been extensively considered to address the problem of inter-cell interference in cellular network. For uplink, to increase the cell edge users' throughput and to enhance network throughput, the signal from users are allowed to be received by more than one point that could be geographically distributed base stations. Generally, multi-site joint processing (JP) with MMSE(Minimum Mean Squared Error) receiver is the optimal linear receiver in terms of system performance. However, the complexity of the JP approach that grow exponentially with the increase of number of receiving antennas, make it impracticable for real system. Therefore, a suboptimal distributed signal processing approach with comparable performance as JP, whereas significantly reduced complexity, has been proposed in the paper. Technically, each reception point in a CoMP cluster pre-process the received signal by applying interference cancellation technique, then the processed signal is conveyed to a serving point via backhaul links between distributed sites to carry out multiple-point combining. Extensive simulations have been performed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed distributed processing approach. The results show that distributed CoMP processing can achieve comparable performance as joint MMSE.