The demand for higher data rates and the scarce spectrum resources drive the adoption of collaborative communication techniques. In this work we shown that the existing cluster based collaborative schemes can be greatly improved in terms of both the achievable performance, and complexity, by allowing overlapping across clusters. Further improvement is achieved by incorporating scheduling to the decoding process. Different variants of the improved schemes are considered and are shown to achieve near optimum performance for practical signal-to-noise ratios for the one- and two-dimensional (hexagonal) Wyner-type models.