The dense deployment of small cells is a promising approach to realize the ever-growing rate demand in future wireless communication systems and centralizing RAN functionality permits joint multi-cell processing at the cost of backhaul traffic. In order to limit the backhaul requirements, cooperative processing among distributed radio access points is an interesting alternative for, e.g., advanced radio resource management, joint cooperative transmission, or joint reception. This paper focusses on cooperative multi-user detection by applying the Distributed Consensus-based Estimation (DiCE) algorithm and two recently proposed modifications for accelerating the iterative approach and to reduce communication overhead. The proposed schemes
are investigated by means of computational complexity, communication overhead, and estimation performance.