TRANSACTIONS ON EMERGING TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech.
(2014)
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/ett.2844
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Interference-tolerating transmission protocol design
for three-cell systems
Chunguo Li
1,3
*, Peng Wang
2
, Fan Sun
3
, John M. Cioffi
3
and Luxi Yang
1
1
School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
2
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
3
Department of Electrical and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA
ABSTRACT
The three-cell system each having one cell-edge mobile terminal (MT) is studied for the scenario of each MT only receiving
the interference from the adjacent cell. Based on the observations that the inter-cell interference could be exploited as
a positive role, a two-time-slot-based transmission protocol is designed for this system by allowing the existence of the
interference received at MT, which saves one time slot over the conventional time division multiple access yet introduces
the inter-cell interference. In order to tackle the interference at the cell-edge users, the problem for designing the precoder
of the base station in these two time slots is proposed to achieve the potential gain from the new transmission protocol.
In this paper, the well-known criterion of the signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio is employed for designing the precoder in
a closed-form expression to demonstrate the significant gain of the new transmission protocol. Furthermore, an adaptive
receiver is designed based on the linear and the nonlinear receivers to further suppress the inter-cell interference. Simulation
results have demonstrated the gain of the designed protocol, the optimised precoder and the adaptive receiver. Copyright
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
*Correspondence
C. Li, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
E-mail: chunguoli@seu.edu.cn
Received 27 February 2014; Revised 1 May 2014; Accepted 15 May 2014
1. INTRODUCTION
The interference issue of multi-cell systems is recognised
as one of the most important topics [1]–[6], which has
been researched extensively in this literature. The existing
schemes can be classified into three categories according
to the different locations of the mobile terminal on the
cell-edge. (A) Single-cell transmission for the first sub-
area where the mobile terminal is very close to the current
base station (BS) yet very far from the other base sta-
tions. In this sub-area, the interference from the other base
stations is very weak because of the path loss and the
large-scale fading as a result of the long distance. (B) Coor-
dinated multi-points transmission (CoMP) for the second
sub-area consisting of the places where the mobile ter-
minal is located in the overlapped area by all the base
stations, that is, this mobile terminal receives all the other
base stations’ interferences. Most of the past researches are
devoted to this scenario to deal with all the other base sta-
tions’ interference. (C) The proposed new protocol for the
third sub-area consisting of the place where the mobile ter-
minal is located on the cell-edge overlapped by the two
adjacent base stations yet far away from the third base sta-
tion. In fact, this scenario falls in the well-known linear
Wyner interference model. The possibility of the mobile
terminal moving into this sub-area is much higher than that
into the second sub-area studied in CoMP because this sub-
area is much larger than the second sub-area. The mobile
terminal in this sub-area receives the strong inference only
from the second base station yet almost no interference
from the third base station because of the path loss and
the large-scale fading. Therefore, it is interesting to study
the transmission protocol tackling the interference therein.
It still remains unknown how to design the transmission
protocol and the corresponding transmission scheme for
this sub-area. Therefore, we design a novel transmission
protocol for this scenario as the first novelty.
Overview on CoMP for the second sub-area transmis-
sions. There are thousands of the results on the CoMP
to deal with the inter-cell interference. However, most of
the existing studies on the inter-cell interferences consider
only the case B as described previously. Two overview arti-
cles [7, 8] summarise the state-of-the-art approaches for the
design of the CoMP transmission schemes by addressing
Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.