Uplink Coordinated Multi-Point ARQ in MIMO Cellular Systems

Coordinated multi-point processing at multiple base stations can improve coverage, system throughput, and cell-edge throughput for future cellular systems. In this paper, we study the coordinated reception of transmitted signals at multiple MIMO base stations to exploit cooperative diversity. In particular, we propose to employ cooperative multicell automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol via backhaul links. The attractiveness of this protocol is that processing between coordinated base stations can be made completely transparent to the mobile user, and it improves the mobile user’s link reliability and throughput significantly compared to noncooperative ARQ protocol. In our proposed protocol, we consider the scenario where the multicell processing involves one of the following three schemes: decode-and-forward, amplify-and-forward, and compress-andforward schemes. We derive the average packet error rate and throughput for these cooperative multicell ARQ protocols. Numerical results show that the cooperative multicell ARQ protocols are promising in terms of average packet error rate and throughput. Furthermore, we show that the degree of improvement depends on the type of cooperative multicell ARQ protocol employed and the operating average signal-to-noise ratio of the main and backhaul links. key words: multicell processing, uplink, coordinated multi-point reception, cooperative automatic repeat request (ARQ), backhaul links