Extending the user capacity of MU-MIMO systems with low detection complexity and receive diversity

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) based technologies are considered as an integral part of the upcoming 5G communications to fulfil the ever-increasing demands of wireless applications with high spectral efficiency requirements. However, in uplink multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) channels, the number of allowed users is limited by the number of receive antennas associated with radio frequency (RF) chains at the base-station and the complexity burden of multiuser detection (MUD). In this paper, a novel group layer MU-MIMO scheme with low complexity MUD is proposed to increase the number of served users well beyond the available RF chains. By taking the advantage of power control and inherent path loss in cellular systems, the allowed users are divided into groups based on their received power. Efficient group power allocation and group layer MUD (GL-MUD) are utilized to provide a valuable tradeoff between complexity and achieved performance. Furthermore, when more receive antennas than RF chains is implemented, a generalized norm based antenna selection algorithm is proposed to enhance the error performance. Symbol error probability expressions are derived and the effectiveness of proposed scheme is demonstrated through numerical simulations compared with the conventional MU-MIMO and non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) systems over Rayleigh fading channels. The results show a substantial increase in user capacity up to two-fold for the available number of RF chains. In addition, significant signal-to-noise ratio gain is achieved using GL-MUD compared with different MUD techniques.