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The coordinated multipoint transmission/reception aided collocated antenna system (CoMP-CAS) and the mobile relay assisted fractional frequency reuse distributed antenna system (MR-FFR-DAS) constitute a pair of virtual-MIMO-based technical options for achieving high spectral efficiency in interference-limited cellular networks. In practice, both techniques have their respective pros and cons, which are studied in this paper by evaluating the achievable cell-edge performance on the uplink of multicell systems. We show that, assuming the same antenna configuration in both networks, the maximum available cooperative spatial diversity (or the multiplexing gain) inherent in the MR-FFR-DAS is lower than that in the CoMP-CAS. However, when the cell-edge mobile stations (MSs) have a low transmission power, the lower complexity MR-FFR-DAS relying on the simple single-cell processing may outperform the CoMP-CAS by using the proposed soft-combining-based probabilistic data association (SC-PDA) receiver, despite the fact that the latter scheme is more complex and incurs a higher cooperation overhead. Furthermore, the benefits of the SC-PDA receiver may be enhanced by properly selecting the MRs' positions. Additionally, we show that the performance of the cell-edge MSs roaming near the angular direction halfway between two adjacent remote antennas (i.e., the “worst-case direction”) of the MR-FFR-DAS may be more significantly improved than that of the cell-edge MSs of other directions by using multiuser power control, which also improves the fairness among cell-edge MSs. Our simulation results show that, given a moderate MS transmit power, the proposed MR-FFR-DAS architecture employing the SC-PDA receiver is capable of achieving significantly better bit error rate (BER) and effective throughput across the entire cell-edge area, including even the worst-case direction and the cell-edge boundary, than the CoMP-CAS architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]