Efficient Detection and Quantization Requirements for the Uplink of Base Station Cooperation Systems

This paper considers the uplink transmission in BS (Base Station) cooperation schemes employing SC-FDE schemes (Single-Carrier with Frequency-Domain Equalization), where MTs (Mobile Terminals) in adjacent cells share the same physical channel. We study the quantization requirements when sending the received signals at different BSs to a central unit that performs the separation of different MTs using iterative frequency-domain receivers. Our performance results show that a relatively coarse quantization, with only 4 or 5 bits in the in-phase and quadrature components of the complex envelope can be sufficient to allow close-to-optimum macro- diversity gains as well as an efficient separation of the transmitted signals associate to each MT.