Performance of Multicell Multicarrier DS-CDMA System with Base-Station Cooperation

In this contribution, we investigate the error performance of a uplink multicarrier direct-sequence code-division (DS-CDMA) system employing both time (T)-domain and frequency (F)-domain spreading, which is referred to as the TF/MC DS-CDMA system for convenience. A multicell scenario with universal frequency reuse is considered, when the multicarrier signals are transmitted over frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. A decentralized multiuser detection (MUD) scheme, which combines the novel receiver multiuser diversity aided multi-stage minimum mean-square error MUD (RMD/MS-MMSE MUD) with the hard-decision data exchanged among the neighboring base-stations (BSs), is proposed and compared with the conventional MUD schemes without BS cooperation. Additionally, detection of several users per stage is considered in the RMD/MS-MMSE MUD to make a tradeoff among the complexity, performance and delay. The impacts of the number of users detected per stage, system load, intercell interference strength, and the spreading factors of both T-domain and F-domain spreading are explored. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the conventional MUD schemes without BS cooperation, and may constitute a promising multicell processing (MCP) scheme.