Trellis-coded co-channel interference canceller for cellular radio

Co-channel interference is a major factor limiting the spectral efficiency of a cellular radio system. A new co-channel interference canceller leading to a significant increase of the traffic capacity of a cellular system is proposed. In this scheme, maximum-likelihood sequence estimation is extended to cancel co-channel interference and is combined with trellis-coded modulation to enhance the co-channel interference cancelling capability, and thus the name trellis-coded co-channel interference canceller (TCC) is given. The performance of the TCC is compared with that of a conventional canceller without trellis coding based on computer simulations assuming static, Rayleigh fading and Nakagami-Rice fading channels. It is shown that the TCC significantly improves the bit error rate performance over a conventional co-channel interference canceller especially for Nakagami-Rice fading channels, typically encountered in a microcellular system, at the cost of a moderately increased computational complexity