Sum Rate Characterization of Joint Multiple Cell-Site Processing

The sum-rate capacity of a cellular system model is analyzed, considering the uplink and downlink channels, while addressing both nonfading and flat-fading channels. The focus is on a simple Wyner-like multicell model, where the system cells are arranged on a circle, and the cell sites are located at the boundaries of the cells. For the uplink channel, analytical expressions of the sum-rate capacities are derived for intra-cell time-division multiple-access (TDMA) scheduling, and a "wideband" (WB) scheme (where all users are active simultaneously utilizing all bandwidths for coding). Assuming individual equal per-cell power constraints, and using the Lagrangian uplink-downlink duality principle, an analytical expression for the sum-rate capacity of the downlink channel is derived for nonfading channels, and shown to coincide with the corresponding uplink result. Introducing flat-fading, lower and upper bounds on the average per-cell ergodic sum-rate capacity are derived. The bounds exhibit an O(loge K) multiuser diversity factor for a number of users per cell K Gt 1, in addition to the array diversity gain. Joint multicell processing is shown to eliminate out-of-cell interference, which is traditionally considered to be a limiting factor in high-rate reliable communications.