Adaptive Sliding-Window Coded Modulation in Cellular Networks

The sliding-window superposition coding scheme aims to mitigate intercell interference at the physical layer by achieving the simultaneous decoding performance with point-to-point channel codes, low- complexity decoding, and minimal coordination overhead. The associated sliding-window coded modulation (SWCM) scheme can be readily implemented using standard off-the-shelf codes, such as the standard LTE turbo code, and tracks the information-theoretical performance guarantee of sliding-window superposition coding. This paper investigates how the basic SWCM scheme performs for the Ped-B fading interference channel model and proposes several improvements in transceiver design, such as soft decoding, input bit-mapping and layer optimization, and power control. Our enhanced SWCM scheme achieves the rates higher than those of the basic SWCM scheme by 10% to 20%, which already shows a significant gain over existing schemes that ignore modulation or coding information of interfering signals. This result confirms the potential of SWCM as a basic building block for physical-layer interference management in 5G and subsequent generations of cellular networks.