  We consider a backhaul-constrained coordinated cellular network. That is, a
single-frequency network with $N+1$ multi-antenna base stations (BSs) that
cooperate in order to decode the users' data, and that are linked by means of a
common lossless backhaul, of limited capacity $\mathrm{R}$. To implement
receive cooperation, we propose distributed compression: $N$ BSs, upon
receiving their signals, compress them using a multi-source lossy compression
code. Then, they send the compressed vectors to a central BS, which performs
users' decoding. Distributed Wyner-Ziv coding is proposed to be used, and is
optimally designed in this work. The first part of the paper is devoted to a
network with a unique multi-antenna user, that transmits a predefined Gaussian
space-time codeword. For such a scenario, the compression codebooks at the BSs
are optimized, considering the user's achievable rate as the performance
metric. In particular, for $N = 1$ the optimum codebook distribution is derived
in closed form, while for $N>1$ an iterative algorithm is devised. The second
part of the contribution focusses on the multi-user scenario. For it, the
achievable rate region is obtained by means of the optimum compression
codebooks for sum-rate and weighted sum-rate, respectively.
