  Massive multiple-input--multiple-output (MIMO) systems can suffer from
coherent intercell interference due to the phenomenon of pilot contamination.
This paper investigates a two-layer decoding method that mitigates both
coherent and non-coherent interference in multi-cell Massive MIMO. To this end,
each base station (BS) first estimates the channels to intra-cell users using
either minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) or element-wise MMSE (EW-MMSE)
estimation based on uplink pilots. The estimates are used for local decoding on
each BS followed by a second decoding layer where the BSs cooperate to mitigate
inter-cell interference. An uplink achievable spectral efficiency (SE)
expression is computed for arbitrary two-layer decoding schemes. A closed-form
expression is then obtained for correlated Rayleigh fading, maximum-ratio
combining, and the proposed large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) in the second
layer. We also formulate a sum SE maximization problem with both the data power
and LSFD vectors as optimization variables. Since this is an NP-hard problem,
we develop a low-complexity algorithm based on the weighted MMSE approach to
obtain a local optimum. The numerical results show that both data power control
and LSFD improves the sum SE performance over single-layer decoding multi-cell
Massive MIMO systems.
