Degrees of Freedom and Achievable Rate of Wide-Band Multi-Cell Multiple Access Channels with No CSIT

This paper considers a $K$ -cell multiple access channel with inter-symbol interference. The primary finding of this paper is that, without instantaneous channel state information at the transmitters, interference-free degrees-of-freedom (DoF) per cell is achievable, provided that the delay spread of the desired links is significantly longer than that of the interfering links when the number of user per cell is sufficiently large. This achievability is shown by a blind interference management method that exploits the relativity in delay spreads between desired and interfering links. In this method, all inter-cell-interference signals are aligned-and-cancelled by using discrete-Fourier-transform-based precoding and combining, both depend only on the lengths of channel-impulse-response. In addition to the DoF analysis, the achievable rate of the proposed method is characterized in a closed-form expression. Some illustrative examples are presented to show an additional sum-DoF gain obtained by exploiting propagation delay in the interfering links or the heterogeneity of the channel coherence time between the desired and interfering links.