Non-Coherent C-RAN: Index Modulation Aided Transmission and Non-Bayesian Detection

In this paper, a non-coherent transmission scheme in cloud-radio access network (C-RAN) for machine-type communication (MTC) is presented. In the proposed scheme, each user is allocated multiple unique pilot sequences, among which part of pilot sequences is activated and their superposition is transmitted when this user is active. The data information is then conveyed by the indices of active pilot sequences utilizing the index modulation principle. At receiver, non-Bayesian maximum likelihood detection is derived to identify the active user and recover the data information simultaneously. Moreover, the detection for quantized received signal in the case of limited-capacity fronthaul link is also presented. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed non-coherent transmit scheme.