Throughput of Cellular Uplink with Dynamic User Activity and Cooperative Base-Stations

The throughput of a linear cellular uplink with a random number of users, different power control schemes, and cooperative base stations is considered in the large system limit where the number of cells is large for non fading Gaussian channels. The analysis is facilitated by establishing an analogy between the cellular channel per-cell throughput with joint multi-cell processing (MCP), and the rate of a deterministic inter-symbol interference (ISI) channel with flat fading. It is shown that, under certain conditions, the dynamics of cellular systems (i.e., a random number of users coupled with a given power control scheme) can be interpreted, as far as the uplink throughput is concerned, as the flat fading process of the equivalent ISI channel. The results are used to demonstrate the benefits of MCP over the conventional single cell processing approach as a function of various system parameters in the presence of random user activity.