Performance of pico-cell clusters with cooperative receivers

Pico-cell clusters have been proposed for providing high capacities to dense sets of users in next generation networks. We consider the uplink channel and analyze the sum-rate performance of two interfering pico-cell clusters with cooperative multi-cell joint decoding (MJD). The performance of a linear receiver is compared with that of non-linear receivers which allow message passing between the clusters in order to cancel the associated interference. The receiver, in all the above cases, jointly processes all signals across a single cluster. However we consider different message passing schemes, and maximize the sum rate over system parameters, including the load in each cell. Our results are valid in the large-system limit as the number of cells and antennas per cluster each tend to infinity with fixed ratio. Numerical results show that the nonlinear receivers provide significantly larger capacities than linear receivers, especially at high SNRs.