A new transceiver architecture for multi-user MIMO communication based on mixture of linear and non-linear reception

In this paper, a new transceiver architecture for K-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast channels (BCs) based on linear and non-linear mixture reception is proposed as an alternative to conventional fully linear zero-forcing (ZF) downlink beamforming. In the new transceiver architecture, two closely-aligned users are paired as a group, and superposition coding and non-linear successive cancellation (SIC) reception based on Pareto-optimal design is applied to each closely-aligned two-user group, while ZF beamforming is maintained across roughly-orthogonal groups. Numerical results show that the proposed new architecture yields non-trivial gain over conventional full ZF beamforming by mitigating the performance degradation of full ZF beamforming caused by closely-aligned channel vectors.