Interference Suppression Receivers for the Cellular Downlink Channel

We consider the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) downlink channel in the next-generation cellular networks and propose two improved interference suppression receivers for combating out-of-cell interference. The proposed receivers exploit the fact that the co-channel interference seen on the downlink channel (especially the downlink control channel) has a particular structure, in order to obtain significantly improved performance while ensuring low decoding complexity. The first receiver does not require the user to decode the interference or be aware of the particular inner codes employed by the interfering transmitters. The second receiver decodes and subtracts a subset of interferers in a channel-dependent order before processing the desired signal. Each interferer is decoded at most once and the choice of the ordered subset mitigates error propagation. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the significant gains obtained by the proposed low-complexity receivers over their conventional counterparts.