Multi-cell cooperation with random user locations under arbitrary signaling

Base station cooperation in cellular networks has been recently recognized as a key technology for mitigating interference, providing thus significant improvements in the system performance. In this paper, we consider a simple scenario consisting of two one-dimensional cells, where the base stations have fixed locations, while the user terminals are randomly distributed on a line. Exploiting the replica method from statistical physics, we derive the ergodic sum-rate under arbitrary signaling for both cooperative and non-cooperative scenarios, when the system size grows large. The obtained results are analytically tractable and can be used to optimize the system parameters in a simple manner. The numerical examples show that the analysis provides good approximations for finite-sized systems.