Physical Layer Network Coding for Distributed Massive MIMO

We consider distributed "massive MIMO" schemes as a compromise between small cells and massive MIMO for 5G wireless. We consider a scheme we call massive MIMO-CoMP which combines the benefits of distributed massive MIMO and CoMP, and propose the use of physical layer network coding for the backhaul of such a network. We show that this provides a better performance with much smaller backhaul load than would a practical CoMP scheme. The performance is also only fractionally poorer than collocated massive MIMO with joint MMSE detection, but enables the benefits of distributed antennas.