In this paper, we propose new radio access network (RAN) architecture for reliable millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, which has the flexibility to meet users' diverse and fluctuating requirements in terms of communication quality. This architecture is composed of multiple radio units (RUs) connected to a common distributed unit (DU) via fronthaul links to virtually enlarge its coverage. We further present grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) for low-latency uplink communications with a massive number of users and robust coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission using blockage prediction for uplink/downlink communications with a high data rate and a guaranteed minimum data rate as the technical pillars of the proposed RAN. The numerical results indicate that our proposed architecture can meet completely different user requirements and realize a user-centric design of the RAN for beyond 5G/6G.

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission and reception is a promising technique for interference mitigation in cellular systems. The scheduling algorithm for CoMP has a significant impact on the network processing complexity and performance. Performing exhaustive search permits centralized scheduling and thus the optimal global solution; however, it incurs a high level of computational complexity and may be impractical or lead to high cost as well as network instability. In order to provide a more realistic scheduling method while balancing performance and complexity, we propose a low complexity centralized scheduling scheme that adaptively selects users for single-cell transmission or different CoMP scheme transmission to maximize the system weighted sum capacity. We evaluate the computational complexity and system-level simulation performance in this paper. Compared to the optimal scheduling method with exhaustive search, the proposed scheme has a much lower complexity level and achieves near optimal performance.