Progressive uplink base station cooperation for backhaul constrained cellular systems

Base station cooperation is a promising solution to the interference limitation of today's cellular networks. The capacity and fairness gains shown by information theoretical analysis of base station cooperation in cellular networks are huge. However, a major downside is the information exchange among base stations, which is the motivation for recent work on backhaul efficient cooperation schemes. In this paper, we show how imperfect channel knowledge affects the performance of backhaul constrained cooperation schemes. In order to achieve high backhaul efficiency even in the presence of channel estimation errors, we introduce a progressive ad hoc cooperation scheme, which is based on the refinability of source coding schemes.