Physical Layer Network Coding in Network MIMO: A New Design for 5G and Beyond

Physical layer network coding (PNC) has been studied to serve wireless network MIMO systems with much lower backhaul load than approaches such as Cloud Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN) and coordinated multipoint (CoMP). In this paper, we present a design guideline of engineering applicable PNC to fulfil the request of high user densities in 5G wireless RAN infrastructure. We show that the proposed design criteria guarantee that: 1) the whole system operates over binary system; 2) the PNC functions utilized at each access point overcome all singular fade states; and 3) the destination can unambiguously recover all source messages, while the overall backhaul load remains at the lowest level. We then develop a two-stage search algorithm to identify the optimum PNC mapping functions which greatly reduces the real-time computational complexity. The impact of estimated channel information and reduced number of singular fade states in different QAM modulation schemes are studied in this paper. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes achieve low outage probability with reduced backhaul load.