EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 652325, 14 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/652325
Research Article

Throughput of Cellular Systems with Conferencing Mobiles and Cooperative Base Stations

O. Simeone,1 O. Somekh,2 G. Kramer,3 H. V. Poor,2 and S. Shamai (Shitz)4

1CWCSPR, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
2Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
3Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA
4Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel

Received 29 July 2007; Accepted 15 February 2008

Academic Editor: Michael Gastpar

Copyright © 2008 O. Simeone et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper considers an enhancement to multicell processing for the uplink of a cellular system, whereby the mobile stations are allowed to exchange messages on orthogonal channels of fixed capacity (conferencing). Both conferencing among mobile stations in different cells and in the same cell (inter- and intracell conferencing, resp.) are studied. For both cases, it is shown that a rate-splitting transmission strategy, where part of the message is exchanged on the conferencing channels and then transmitted cooperatively to the base stations, is capacity achieving for sufficiently large conferencing capacity. In case of intercell conferencing, this strategy performs convolutional pre-equalization of the signal encoding the common messages in the spatial domain, where the number of taps of the finite-impulse response equalizer depends on the number of conferencing rounds. Analysis in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime and numerical results validate the advantages of conferencing as a complementary technology to multicell processing.