Uplink Joint Detection: From theory to practice

Ensuring a decent Quality of Experience (QoE) is fundamental for service providers, in particular mobile networks operators, when designing their current and future connectivity solutions. With this aim in view, they are compelled to cope with potential QoE detractors such as Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) which is expected to be a liability with a foreseen network densification. This issue was anticipated in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks and many solutions leveraging cooperation schemes between the access nodes to alleviate the ICI’s effects can be found in the literature, notably for uplink (UL) transmissions which pose a greater challenge. Among the cooperative models dealing with UL ICI, Joint Detection (JD) is particularly interesting since it promises substantial throughput gains while maintaining a high spectral efficiency. However, its practical feasibility is still unclear. In the following work, we propose a platform gathering a set of architectural, functional and technical requirements to endow realistic LTE networks with JD capabilities.