On the Capacity of Variable Density Cellular Systems under Multicell Decoding

The majority of multicell-decoding cellular models preserve a fundamental assumption which has initially appeared in Wyner's model, namely the collocation of user terminals (UTs). Although this assumption produces more tractable mathematical models, it is unrealistic w.r.t. current practical cellular systems. In this paper, we alleviate this assumption by assuming uniformly distributed UTs. The model under investigation is the uplink channel of a planar cellular array in the presence of power-law path loss and flat fading. In this context, we employ a free probability approach to evaluate the effect of UT distribution on the optimal sum-rate capacity of a variable-density cellular system.