Performance Analysis of Outage-Limited Multi-Access Cellular Systems with Macro-Diversity

In this paper, we shall analysis the uplink system goodput (bits/sec/Hz successfully decoded) and per-user packet outage in a cellular network using multi-user detection with successive interference cancellation (MUD-SIC). Slow fading channels and interference cancellation error occurs due to packet outage in each decoding stage are considered. We are interested to study the roles of macro-diversity, decoding order and power allocation on the MUD-SIC performance where the effect of potential error-propagation during the SIC detection is taken into account. Based on the information theoretical framework, we derive the closed-form expressions on the total system goodput as well as the per-user packet outage probability. We show that the system goodput does not scale with SNR due to mutual interference in the SIC process and macro-diversity (MDiv) could alleviate the problem and benefit to the system goodput.