On Estimating the Number of Co-Channel Interferers in MIMO Cellular Systems

Two crucial tasks arising in current wireless packet networks are those of link adaptation and power control. It has been recently shown that large performance gains can be attained if proper algorithms for the aforementioned tasks are employed. These algorithms require the estimation of interference power. To this end, an intermediate step is the estimation of the number of active co-channel interferers. This letter aims at determining such an estimate without resorting to traditional training sequences.