Reliable Detection of Unknown Cell-Edge Users via Canonical Correlation Analysis

Providing reliable service to users close to the edge between cells remains a challenge in cellular systems, even as 5G deployment is around the corner. These users are subject to significant signal attenuation, which also degrades their uplink channel estimates. Even joint detection using base station (BS) cooperation often fails to reliably detect such users, due to near-far power imbalance, and channel estimation errors. Is it possible to bypass the channel estimation stage and design a detector that can reliably detect cell-edge user signals under significant near-far imbalance? This paper shows, perhaps surprisingly, that the answer is affirmative - albeit not via traditional multiuser detection. Exploiting that cell-edge user signals are weak but common to different base stations, while cell-center users are unique to their serving BS, this paper establishes an elegant connection between cell-edge user detection and canonical correlation analysis (CCA) of the associated space-time baseband-equivalent matrices. It proves that CCA identifies the common subspace of these matrices, even under significant intra-and inter-cell interference. The resulting mixture of cell-edge user signals can subsequently be unraveled using a well-known algebraic signal processing technique. Interestingly, the proposed approach does not even require that the signals from the different base stations are synchronized - the right synchronization can be automatically determined as well. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves order of magnitude BER improvements compared to `oracle' multiuser detection that assumes perfect knowledge of the cell-center user channels.