Method for communication in a communication network

A method for communication the method comprising:

• signaling, by a base station (BS), at least one antenna port number from a plurality of antenna port numbers to the at least one user equipment (UE), for reference signal (RS) transmission, wherein the at least one antenna port number is assigned according to at least one of a cell identifier, a sector identifier, and a user identifier, such that antenna port assignments differ across at least two sectors or base stations;
• receiving, by the BS, data and a RS corresponding to the at least one UE, the data and the RS are being received on one or more receive antennas of the BS, wherein:
• the RS comprises of occupied RS subcarriers and null subcarriers,
• the occupied RS subcarriers and null subcarriers being mutually exclusive within a physical resource block (PRB), and
• a location of occupied RS subcarriers and null subcarrier positions are selected according to the signaled at least one antenna port;
• estimating, by the BS, one or more channel parameters, comprising channel state information (CSI), using the occupied subcarriers associated with the received RS;
• estimating interference plus noise parameters, comprising interference plus noise covariance, using the null subcarriers, wherein said channel parameters and said interference plus noise parameters are associated with one or more receive antennas of the BS;
• and
• equalizing, by the BS, the received data on the one or more receive antennas using the measured channel parameters and the interference plus noise parameters corresponding to the at least one signaled port to suppress inter-cell interference caused by UEs assigned the same antenna port in other sectors, for interference rejection and data detection.