Information theoretic analysis of multicell decoding and Amplify-and-Forward cooperation between mobiles for TDMA cellular systems

Cooperation between base stations and collaborative transmission between mobile terminals are two technologies currently under study as promising paradigms for next generation communications systems. In this paper, a first look to the interplay between these two approaches is provided by studying the per-cell achievable sum-rate (throughput) of different cooperative protocols under a simplified model for the uplink of a TDMA cellular system. The analysis is limited to non-regenerative (amplify-and-forward) cooperation between terminals. It is shown that while AF cooperation is generally advantageous for single cell processing (i.e., with no collaboration between base stations), its benefits when combined with multicell processing are limited to the regime of low to moderate transmission rates.