Coordinated multi-point decoding with dual-polarized antennas

Coordinated multi-point processing has shown great potential for cellular networks, while multiple antenna systems (MIMO) is the key to next generation wireless communications. Full exploitation of MIMO technology, however, demands high antenna separation at the transceivers. This paper investigates the use of dual polarized antennas as a mean to overcome hardware size limitations. Uplink ergodic sum-rate capacity of a multicell joint processing (MJP) system employing dual polarized antennas is evaluated through theoretical analysis. Results are supported by numerical simulations. The designed system incorporates uniformly distributed users, path loss and Rayleigh fading, thus extending the well known Wyner model. Optimal and MMSE receiver architectures are compared in terms of capacity and complexity. System capacity is calculated with respect to cell size or cross polar discrimination (XPD). The results support the use of dual-polar decoding for low XPD, dense cellular systems while per polarization processing is acceptable in high XPD, sparse systems.