Receiver design for the uplink of base station cooperation systems employing SC-FDE

The presented paper considers the uplink transmission in base station (BS) cooperation schemes where mobile terminals (MTs) in adjacent cells share the same physical channel. We consider single-carrier with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) combined with iterative frequency-domain receivers based on the iterative block decision feedback equalization (IB-DFE). We study the quantization requirements when sending the received signals, from different MTs, at different BSs to a central unit that performs the separation of different MTs using iterative frequency-domain receivers. Our performance results show that a relatively coarse quantization, with only 4 bits in the in-phase and quadrature components of the complex envelope already allows close-to-optimum macro-diversity gains, as well as an efficient separation of the transmitted signals associated with each MT.