Joint OSC Receiver for Evolved GSM/EDGE Systems

This paper is focused on evolved GSM/EDGE systems complying to the new feature Voice services over Adaptive Multi-user channels on One Slot (VAMOS), recently introduced in the 3GPP GSM/EDGE radio access network (GERAN) standard. VAMOS enables the transmission of two GSM voice streams on the same radio resource through the so called Orthogonal Sub Channel (OSC) multiple access technique which aims at doubling the number of users served by a cell. When adopting this feature, the GSM network experiences a mixture of in-cell and out-of-cell interference which has to be handled by advanced receivers with interference rejection capabilities. In this paper, a novel two-stage receiver is proposed and tested for the uplink of GSM VAMOS systems. The new scheme combines a pre-filtering stage for out-of-cell interference mitigation with a multi-user detector (MUD) for joint equalization of the two multiplexed OSC streams. The approach is suited for either single-antenna or multi-antenna base stations and can accommodate multiple filters for each user to cope with complex multipath propagation scenarios. The new solution is compared with other existing interference cancellation techniques here applied to the specific OSC scenario. Numerical results show significant performance gains in realistic multi-cell simulated scenarios.