Abstract
The increasing demand for connectivity and throughput, despite the spectrum limitations, has triggered a paradigm shift towards non-orthogonal signal transmissions. However, the complexity requirements of near-optimal detection methods for such systems becomes impractical, due to the large number of mutually interfering streams and to the rank-deficient or ill-determined nature of the corresponding interference matrix. This work introduces g-MultiSphere; a generic massively parallel and near-optimal sphere-decoding-based approach that, in contrast to prior work, applies to both well- and ill-determined non-orthogonal systems. We show that g-MultiSphere is the first approach that can support large uplink multi-user MIMO systems with numbers of concurrently transmitting users that exceed the number of receive antennas by a factor of two or more, while attaining throughput gains of up to 60% and with reduced complexity requirements in comparison to known approaches. By eliminating the need for sparse signal transmissions for nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes, g-MultiSphere can support more users than existing systems with better detection performance and practical complexity requirements. In comparison to state- of-the-art detectors for NOMA schemes and nonorthogonal signal waveforms (e.g., SEFDM) g-MultiSphere can be up to an order of magnitude less complex, and can provide throughput gains of up to 60%.