Cell-Edge Interferometry: Reliable Detection Of Unknown Cell-Edge Users Via Canonical Correlation Analysis

A key challenge in 4G and emerging 5G systems is that of reliably detecting the uplink transmissions of users close to the edge between cells. These users are subject to significant signal attenuation due to path loss, and frequent hand-off from one cell to the other, making channel estimation very challenging. Even multiuser detection using base station cooperation often fails to detect such users, due to channel estimation errors and the sensitivity of multiuser detection to near-far power imbalance. Is it even possible to reliably decode the cell-edge users' signals under these circumstances? This paper shows, perhaps surprisingly, that with a suitable base station 'interferometry' strategy, the cell-edge users' signals can be reliably decoded at low SNR under mild conditions. Exploiting the fact that cell-edge users' signals are weak but common to both base stations, while users close to a base station are unique to that base station, reliable detection is enabled by Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) - a machine learning technique that reliably estimates a common subspace, even in the presence of strong individual interference. Free from cellcenter interference, the resulting mixture of cell-edge signals can then be unraveled using well-known algebraic signal processing techniques. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed detector achieves order of magnitude BER improvement compared to an `oracle' zero-forcing with successive interference cancellation that assumes perfect knowledge of all channels. The paper also includes proof of common subspace identifiability for the assumed generative model, which was curiously missing from the machine learning / CCA literature.