Inter-Site Joint Detection with Reduced Backhaul Capacity Requirements for the 3GPP LTE Uplink

Cellular networks operating with a frequency reuse factor of one are often interference-limited. For that reason, base station (BS) cooperation techniques aiming at mitigating the effects of interference caused by simultaneous transmissions on the same frequency resources in nearby sectors may considerably improve the system performance. However, for that purpose generally high-capacity backhaul links are required, which are often not available in practice. A crucial factor for realizing such cooperative techniques in the short-term therefore is to develop efficient ways for reducing the backhaul load without significantly worsening the achievable performance. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of inter-site joint detection with reduced backhaul capacity requirements for the uplink of a 3GPP UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, where different BSs cooperate with each other in order to jointly detect the signals transmitted by various users. By means of extensive system-level simulations, we show that with the proposed methods still significant performance gains may be realized over conventional systems-especially in terms of the cell-edge throughput-while the backhaul load can be considerably reduced compared to a system with full-complexity joint detection.