Gerhard Bauch

Philipp Mohr, Jasper Brüggmann, Viet Hoang Le et al.

Block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) codes provide a flexible framework for constructing codes with near-capacity performance and low-complexity sliding-window decoding. However, existing BMST variants show contrasting performance limitations: recursive BMST (rBMST) codes suffer from error propagation but avoid high error floors, whereas non-recursive BMST codes exhibit the opposite behavior. Motivated by these complementary characteristics, we combine recursive and non-recursive components through parallel and serial concatenation, yielding mixed BMST (mBMST) codes. The proposed framework subsumes existing BMST variants and enables new BMST structures. Simulations show that these structures improve FER and BER performance with lower memory requirements than rBMST.

Leonard Paul Schulz, Stefan Schwarz, Gerhard Bauch

Cooperative massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) promises large gains over cellular deployments, but existing comparisons of different architectures often mix antenna distribution, inter-site coordination, and processing assumptions. This paper introduces a graph-based framework for fair comparison of cellular, coordinated, and cell-free massive-MIMO systems. We differentiate between two key properties, namely antenna distribution and inter-site cooperation, which yields seven representative system types. We derive compatible uplink and downlink spectral efficiency (SE) expressions, including an uplink bound for detectors with mixed instantaneous and statistical effective channel state information (CSI), and adapt scalable user association and processing rules to all considered architectures. We evaluate these systems using extensive numerical simulations and show that for a fair comparison much larger simulation areas (at least 2.5 $\times$ 2.5 km2) than commonly used are required. We introduce the relative capacity, which measures how closely each architecture approaches centralized cell-free processing. The results show that coordinated, phase-aligned beamforming across spatially distributed antennas is the main source of cooperation gains. In dense deployments with few antennas per access point (AP), coordinated Distributed Antenna System (DAS) and hybrid cell-free architectures achieve much of the centralized cell-free performance while requiring substantially weaker midhaul assumptions.