Power Control and Performance Analysis of Outage-Limited Cellular Network with MUD-SIC and Macro-Diversity

In this paper, we analyze the uplink 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). We consider non-ergodic fading channels where microscopic fading channel information is not available at the transmitters. As a result, packet outage occurs whenever the data rate of packet transmissions exceeds the instantaneous mutual information even if powerful channel coding is applied for protection. We are interested to study the role of macro-diversity (MDiv) between multiple base stations on the MUD-SIC performance where the effect of potential error-propagation during the SIC processing is taken into account. While the jointly optimal power and decoding order in the MUD-SIC are NP hard problem, we derive a simple on/off power control and asymptotically optimal decoding order with respect to the transmit power. 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.