Uplink Throughput of TDMA Cellular Systems with Multicell Processing and Amplify-and-Forward Cooperation Between Mobiles

Cooperation between base stations and collaborative transmission between mobile terminals are two technologies currently under study as promising paradigms for next generation communications systems. In this paper, we provide a first look to the interplay between these two approaches by studying the per-cell achievable sum-rate (throughput) of different cooperative protocols under a simplified model for the uplink of a TDMA cellular system. The analysis is limited to non-regenerative (amplify-and-forward) cooperation schemes between terminals for their´simplicity and appeal to a practical implementation. A closed form expression for the (asymptotic) achievable rate of multicell processing combined with amplify-and-forward collaboration at the terminals is derived for an AWGN (i.e., no fading) scenario. Moreover, the impact of fading is investigated numerically, allowing to draw some conclusions on the impact of multicell diversity (or macrodiversity) on the performance of collaborative schemes among the terminals. In particular, we show that while AF cooperation is generally advantageous for single cell processing (i.e., with no collaboration between base stations), its benefits when combined with multicell processing are limited to the regime of low to moderate transmission rates.