User-Centric Detection with Interference and Base Station Connection Sparsities

In this paper, we investigate the signal detection for user-centric network (UCN) massive multi-input multi-output (mMIMO) system. We consider that the users are divided into multiple user groups (UGs). For each UG, leveraging the interference and base station (BS) connection sparsities, we reveal that the performance of the minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) detector can be guaranteed by a small number of interfering users and a limited number of associated BSs. Then, we propose a user-centric detection method that decouples the detection process for each UG into two stages. In the first stage, local MF is performed at each associated BSs using local information. In the second stage, group-wise interference cancellation (IC) is carried out to obtain detection results at the primary serving BS (PSBS) of each UG, with information exchanged from auxiliary serving BSs (ASBSs). Simulation results confirm the effectiveness and computational efficiency of our proposed user-centric detection for the UCN mMIMO system.