Detection scheme for PNC-based cell-free MIMO systems

Abstract

Cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (cell-free MIMO) is a promising concept to overcome inter-cell interference and avoid non-uniform data rates among users by combining the best features of ultra-dense networks and MIMO. Hence, cell-free MIMO can fulfill the increasing demand on data rate with uniformly good coverage for the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communications. In addition to that, physical-layer network coding (PNC) reduces the transmission delay since it requires only two time slots instead of four time slots to exchange information between two users. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme called PNC-based cell-free MIMO to improve reliability further while reducing the transmission delay. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme regarding the bit error rate in different system configurations. The proposed PNC-based cell-free MIMO achieves significantly lower error probability than the conventional cell-free MIMO. © 2023 IEEE.