  We consider a multi-cell frequency-selective fading uplink channel (network
MIMO) from K single-antenna user terminals (UTs) to B cooperative base stations
(BSs) with M antennas each. The BSs, assumed to be oblivious of the applied
codebooks, forward compressed versions of their observations to a central
station (CS) via capacity limited backhaul links. The CS jointly decodes the
messages from all UTs. Since the BSs and the CS are assumed to have no prior
channel state information (CSI), the channel needs to be estimated during its
coherence time. Based on a lower bound of the ergodic mutual information, we
determine the optimal fraction of the coherence time used for channel training,
taking different path losses between the UTs and the BSs into account. We then
study how the optimal training length is impacted by the backhaul capacity.
Although our analytical results are based on a large system limit, we show by
simulations that they provide very accurate approximations for even small
system dimensions.
