User-Centric Design of Millimeter Wave Communications for Beyond 5G and 6G

Abstract

In this paper, we propose new radio access network (RAN) architecture for reliable millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, which has the flexibility to meet users' diverse and fluctuating requirements in terms of communication quality. This architecture is composed of multiple radio units (RUs) connected to a common distributed unit (DU) via fronthaul links to virtually enlarge its coverage. We further present grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) for low-latency uplink communications with a massive number of users and robust coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission using blockage prediction for uplink/downlink communications with a high data rate and a guaranteed minimum data rate as the technical pillars of the proposed RAN. The numerical results indicate that our proposed architecture can meet completely different user requirements and realize a user-centric design of the RAN for beyond 5G/6G.