Transmit power and other-cell interference reduction via successive interference cancellation with imperfect channel estimation

Successive interference cancellation (SIC), in conjunction with orthogonal convolutional codes, has been shown to approach the Shannon capacity for an AWGN channel. However, multi-cell fading wireless channels induce error in the amplitude and phase estimates required to perform perfect cancellation of the interference. By combining SIC with a previously developed power control algorithm, we show that other-cell interference and transmit power can be reduced by an order of magnitude or more relative to a conventional (IS-95 style) CDMA system. In addition, even as estimation error becomes large, the capacity is more than doubled over systems without interference cancellation or those that employ SIC without optimum power control.