Uplink coordination of base stations with proportionally fair user rates

In earlier work, we proposed a novel approach towards lifting the limits imposed by cochannel interference on the uplink spectral efficiency of a cellular network, viz., coordinating each base station with several of its neighbors in the reception of user signals, and exploiting the increased spatial dimensionality for effective interference suppression. Here, we evaluate by simulation the potential gain in spectral efficiency from such coordination, when there is one user per base station antenna in the network, and the data rates at which the users are served are subject to a proportional fairness criterion (as opposed to the equal rate requirement in the prior work). We highlight the dependence of the spectral efficiency gain on the number of rings of neighbors with which each base station is coordinated, as well as the underlying signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distribution in the network. Results from this study point to the possibility of significantly increasing edge user rates (by a factor of 10) while simultaneously doubling system spectral efficiency, under high-SNR conditions.