Structured Superposition for Backhaul Constrained Cellular Uplink

In this paper, we demonstrate the advantage of the inherent algebraic structure of lattice codes, for the uplink channel of a cellular deployment. The out-of-cell interference is assumed to be symmetric, as in Wyner's model. We employ a new relaying technique, compute-and-forward, which allows cell-sites to decode equations of the transmitted bits by exploiting the channel interference. However, the standard compute-and-forward technique is penalized whenever the channel coefficients are non-integer. We develop a superposition strategy to mitigate this penalty. By using part of the power towards a private message, we can effectively modify the channel seen by compute-and-forward. We demonstrate that, in certain regimes, this mixed strategy significantly outperforms decode-and-forward, compress-and-forward, and ordinary compute-and-forward.