A method and apparatus for data transmission in a cellular system are disclosed herein In one embodiment, the method comprises receiving transmissions of uplink pilot signals made in each slot, by a number of UEs, over the radio resource elements in slots that are allocated for uplink pilot transmission, wherein the number of UEs in the vicinity of at least one base station exceeds the number of radio resource elements that have been allocated for uplink pilot transmission in the slot; estimating large-scale radio-channel propagation strengths of a plurality of nearby UEs to a base station; estimating radio-propagation channel coefficients between each base-station antenna and each UE, in a subset of UEs in the plurality of nearby UEs that have large-scale radio-channel propagation strengths to the base station that are stronger than those UEs in the plurality of nearby UEs not part of the subset; and transmitting to in-cell UEs via multi-user beamforming, including suppressing interference to one or more nearby out-of-cell UEs that are part of the plurality of nearby UEs.