Channel coding for cochannel interference suppression in wireless communication systems

Cochannel interference is a major impairment in cellular systems. In practice the performance of time and frequency division multiple access (TDMA and FDMA) systems is limited by a few dominant cochannel interferers. Conventional channel coding techniques treat this interference as noise to mitigate its effect. It is shown that cochannel interference can be totally suppressed by using a adaptive nonlinear decoder. We illustrate our ideas using codes in a real (complex) field as well as codes in a finite field. The decoding technique can be combined with antenna diversity to offer increased interference suppression capability.