Differentiated Reception Modes Based Multiple Access

Abstract

In recent years, the continuous increase in wireless data services and users’ traffic demand has been imposing great challenges on traditional multiple access control (MAC) methods. Some existing MAC techniques improve the communication system’s spectral efficiency (SE) via signal processing based cochannel interference (CCI) management. However, no interference management (IM) is free, i.e., its realization is based on the consumption of some communication resources, such as power and degree-of-freedom (DoF), which can also be used for the user’s desired data transmission. To lessen the resource cost for IM-based MAC, we exploit interactions among multiple wireless signals to propose a new MAC method, namely, Differentiated Reception Modes based Multiple Access (DRM-MA), in this paper. Under DRM-MA, a central control unit (CCU) is adopted to manage and pair multiple transmitting antennas with their serving receivers (Rxs). The CCU first calculates the phase difference of signals sent from each candidate antenna and perceived by the two receiving antennas of an Rx based on the locations of the transmitting antenna and Rx. Then, the CCU selects and pairs a proper transmitting antenna with each Rx, so that various Rxs can adopt either additive or subtractive reception mode to postprocess the signals received by its two antennas to realize in-phase desired signal construction and inverse-phase interference destruction. DRM-MA can avoid transmission performance loss incurred by signal processing-based IM. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results have shown that DRM-MA can enable concurrent data transmissions of multiple antenna-receiver pairs and output a high system’s SE.