  This paper studies a two-layer decoding method that mitigates inter-cell
interference in multi-cell Massive MIMO systems. In layer one, each base
station (BS) estimates the channels to intra-cell users and uses the estimates
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, while a closed-form expression is obtained for correlated
Rayleigh fading channels, maximum-ratio combining (MRC), and large-scale fading
decoding (LSFD) in the second layer. We formulate a non-convex sum SE
maximization problem with both the data power and LSFD vectors as optimization
variables and develop an algorithm based on the weighted MMSE (minimum mean
square error) approach to obtain a stationary point with low computational
complexity.
