Base Station Cooperation with Non-Ideal Backhaul and Non-Full Buffer Traffic

Base station cooperation has been shown to significantly mitigate the interference perceived in cellular networks and improve the quality of user experience. On the uplink, joint processing (JP) across antennas within a cluster of base stations yields significant gain, but requires significant backhaul to transport complex I & Q signals. The Network Interference Cancellation Engine (NICE) can yield throughput gains similar to that of JP, but with one to two orders of magnitude less backhaul. While NICE demonstrates significant potential for cellular networks, its performance has been evaluated under somewhat idealistic conditions. For instance, full buffer traffic has generally been assumed, thereby leading to a fully loaded system with strong interference. Bursty traffic may result in a partially loaded system with less interference and impact the gains of interference-mitigating techniques such as NICE. In addition, an ideal backhaul with negligible delay has generally been assumed. Delays in information exchanges between base stations may decrease the efficacy of base station cooperation. In this paper, the performance of NICE is evaluated under non full buffer traffic and non-ideal backhaul.