Cellular systems with multicell processing and conferencing links between mobile stations

In this paper, multi-cell processing for the uplink of a cellular system is studied in the presence of orthogonal channels of fixed capacity between mobile stations in adjacent cells (conferencing). 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 an asymptotically large conferencing capacity. This strategy can be regarded as able to perform 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 multi-cell processing.