Uplink Macro Diversity of Limited Backhaul Cellular Network

In this paper new achievable rates are derived, for the uplink channel of a cellular network with joint multicell processing, where unlike previous results, the ideal backhaul network has finite capacity per-cell. Namely, the cell sites are linked to the central joint processor via lossless links with finite capacity. The cellular network is abstracted by symmetric models, which render analytical treatment plausible. For this idealistic model family, achievable rates are presented for cell-sites that use compress-and-forward schemes combined with local decoding, for both Gaussian and fading channels. The rates are given in closed form for the classical Wyner model and the soft-handover model.