An SDR-based Turbo-SIC Implementation: Towards 5G New Radio Advanced Receiver for Uplink Boosting

Significant uplink capacity improvements in next generation 5G wireless networks, especially in enhanced Machine Type Communications (eMTC) for emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications where the large number of users shares the limited band., can be achieved by assigning the same time-frequency resources to several users simultaneously. This requires advanced signal processing at the eNB, named multiuser detection (MUD), to reduce the mutual interference between users and appropriately decode the superposed signals. Turbo-SIC is a very efficient MUD scheme that applies Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC), based on soft outputs of Turbo decoder, prior to the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) detection. In this paper we introduce the implementation of Turbo-SIC receiver that follows the basic specifications of Long term Evolution (LTE) systems. We use an LTE-compliant open-source software defined radio (SDR) platform, named OpenAirInterface (OAI), both to experimentally examine the Turbo-SIC detection performance in LTE system and to evaluate processing requirements for real-time implementation on General Purpose Processor (GPP).