Parallel interference cancellation for Cell-Free C-RANs

Abstract

This paper formulates a linear receiver for the uplink of centralized, possibly cloud-based, radio access networks operating in a cell-free fashion. This receiver, which draws on the notion of soft parallel interference cancellation, exhibits substantial interference rejection abilities, yet it does not involve any matrix inversions. Its computational cost is hence decidedly inferior to that of an MMSE receiver, but its performance is markedly superior to that of matched-filter beamforming. And, with an adequate sparsification of the channel matrix that it derives from, the proposed receiver can be rendered scalable in the sense of its computational cost per access point not growing with size of the network.