Performance analysis of cellular mobile systems with successive co-channel interference cancellation

This paper presents an analytical framework for the performance evaluation of cellular mobile radio systems equipped with smart antenna systems. In particular, the paper focuses on low-complexity systems which are able to successively suppress the strongest active interferers. The desired user fading statistics is assumed to be flat Rayleigh, Rician, or Nakagami, whereas the interfering signals are assumed to be independent and subject to slow flat Rayleigh fading. The paper starts by presenting generic closed-form expressions for the the carrier-to-interference ratio probability density function after interference cancellation. Based on that, exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and average error rate formulas are derived. Finally, a comparison with a practical cancellation scheme and the impact of some practical considerations on the performance of successive interference cancellation are investigated. More specifically, the effect of traffic loading, the overall spectral efficiency gain, and the impact of time delay are studied.