Advanced Receiver for 3GPP 5G-A Intra-Cell Inter-User Interference Mitigation

In the fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system, addressing inter-user interference is a significant challenge for efficient network deployment. To this end, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) RAN4 Working Group is diligently working on the investigation and advancement of sophisticated receiver technologies with the primary aim of enhancing interference management and mitigation strategies. Based on the receiver architecture under the 3GPP standard specification, this study systematically investigated the network assistance signalling required for advanced receivers in interference scenarios. It focuses on analyzing the impact mechanism of scheduling parameters, such as demodulation reference signal (DMRS) sequence information and modulation order, on the receiver performance and evaluates the performance of the modulation order blind detection technique in depth. The simulation experimental results show that the reduced complexity maximum likelihood (R-ML) receiver exhibits significant advantages in terms of interference suppression performance and outperforms the traditional minimum mean square error interference suppression combining (MMSE-IRC) and enhanced minimum mean square error interference suppression combining (E-MMSE-IRC) receivers. With the advancement of the 3GPP Release 18 standard, R-ML receiver technology is expected to be widely used in actual network deployment, which will provide key technical support for system performance improvement in MU-MIMO scenarios.