Base Station Cooperation in MIMO-Aided Multi-User Multi-Cell Systems Employing Distributed Probabilistic Data Association Based Soft Reception

Inter-cell co-channel interference (CCI) mitigation is investigated in the context of cellular systems relying on dense frequency reuse. A distributed Base Station (BS) cooperation aided soft reception scheme using the Probabilistic Data Association (PDA) algorithm and Soft Combining (SC) is proposed for the uplink of multi-user multi-cell MIMO systems. The realistic hexagonal cellular model relying on unity Frequency Reuse (FR) is considered, where both the BSs and the Mobile Stations (MSs) are equipped with multiple antennas. Local cooperation based message passing is used instead of a global message passing chain for the sake of reducing the backhaul traffic. The PDA algorithm is employed as a low complexity solution for producing soft information, which facilitates the employment of SC at the individual BSs in order to generate the final soft decision metric. Our simulations and analysis demonstrate that despite its low additional complexity and backhaul traffic, the proposed distributed PDA-aided reception scheme significantly outperforms the conventional non-cooperative benchmarkers.