Anywhere Decoding: Low-Overhead Uplink Interference Management for Wireless Networks

Inter-cell interference (ICI) is one of the major performance-limiting factors in the context of modern cellular systems. To tackle ICI, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) schemes have been proposed as a key technology for next-generation mobile communication systems. Although CoMP schemes offer promising theoretical gains, their performance could degrade significantly because of practical issues such as limited backhaul. To address this issue, we explore a novel uplink interference management scheme called anywhere decoding, which requires exchanging just a few bits of information per coding interval among the base stations (BSs). Despite the low overhead of anywhere decoding, we observe considerable gains in the outage probability performance of cell-edge users, compared to no cooperation between BSs. Additionally, asymptotic results of the outage probability for high-SNR regimes demonstrate that anywhere decoding schemes achieve full spatial diversity through multiple decoding opportunities, and they are within 1.5 dB of full cooperation.