On Intercell Interference and Its Cancellation in Cellular Multicarrier CDMA Systems

The handling of intercell interference at the cell border area is a strong demand in future communication systems to guarantee efficient use of the available bandwidth. Therefore, this paper focuses on the application of iterative intercell interference cancellation schemes in cellular multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems at the receiver side for the downlink. First, the influence of the interfering base stations to the total intercell interference is investigated. Then, different concepts for intercell interference cancellation are described and investigated for scenarios with several interfering cells. The first approach is based on the use of the hard decision of the demodulator to reconstruct the received signals. This does not require the higher amount of complexity compared to the second approach which is based on the use of the more reliable soft values from the decoding process. Furthermore, the extrinsic information as a reliability measure of this soft iterative cancellation process is investigated in more detail based on the geographical position of the mobile terminal. Both approaches show significant performance gains in the severe cell border area. With the soft intercell interference cancellation scheme, it is possible to reach the single-user bound. Therefore, the intercell interference can be almost eliminated.