Integer-forcing architectures for uplink cloud radio access networks

Consider an uplink cloud radio access network where users are observed simultaneously by several base stations, each with a rate-limited link to a central processor, which wishes to decode all transmitted messages. Recent efforts have demonstrated the advantages of compression-based strategies that send quantized channel observations to the central processor, rather than attempt local decoding. We propose an end-to-end integer-forcing framework for compression-based uplink cloud radio access. For the important special case where the users have no channel state information and communicate at symmetric rates, we demonstrate via simulations that our framework is competitive with state-of-the-art Wyner-Ziv-based strategies. In particular, our framework offers similar performance with lower implementation complexity.