Inter-cell relaying and base station cooperation in cellular uplink systems

Joint decoding at the base stations is investigated as a means to improve the uplink/downlink throughput of current cellular systems over fading channels. In this paper, the multi-cell relay-assisted time-division uplink system, i.e. one active user per time slot per cell with a relay serving that user, is studied. A linear mesh network is considered in which a single user per-cell communicates to a local base station via a dedicated relay. Base station cooperation through multi-cell decoding, where each cell has a single relay that amplifies and forwards the desired transmission signals to the base station. All the base stations in the mesh network collaboratively decode the signals received at each. The key contribution of this paper is compare the ergodic sum-rate in single-cell processing with multi-cell processing, under the system model, separately.