Analysis of Iterative Soft Inter-Cell Interference Cancellation in Cellular MC-CDMA

We address inter-cell interference cancellation (ICIC) within a cellular multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) downlink system. The iterative soft ICIC concept is based on the use of the log-likelihood ratios from the decoding process. This approach shows significant performance gains in the severe cell border area. The iterative ICIC scheme can approach the single-user bound, and therefore, eliminates almost the interference at the cell border. Analysis regarding the convergence behavior of the ICIC strategy to more than one interfering cell are given based on the extrinsic information of the iterative process. Furthermore, a strategy of choosing the strongest interferers to be canceled is investigated which reduces significantly the complexity of the cancellation algorithm.