Turbo-BLAST with semi-blind co-channel interference cancellation in multicell MIMO systems

Multicell MIMO is typically interference-limited. Advanced signal-processing techniques like multiuser detection can be exploited to effectively combat co-channel interference and significantly improve system performance, provided perfect information for interferers is available. This consumes substantial amount of scarce system resource and may be difficult to obtain in practice. In this paper we first exploit the turbo principle to enhance an effective blind detection method based on multiuser kurtosis (MUK) maximization, thus coined as turbo-MUK In turbo-MUK a few training symbols are needed to resolve the possible phase and ordering ambiguity, making it a semi-blind method. Then we propose a multi-cell MIMO receiver structure that employs turbo-BLAST to detect the desired signal and turbo-MUK to deal with interference, and iterates between the two in a group multistage detection fashion to further improve the performance. Simulation results indicate that our newly proposed technique achieves satisfactory performance, while significantly reduces the associated system overhead.