Can Quantum Receiver Beat the SIC Limit in Multiple Access Networks?

Abstract

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is an important technique for 5G/B5G wireless receivers to resolve interfering signals from multiple users. While SIC has been proven to approach the channel capacity limit in many settings of multiple access networks, it remains unknown if this limit can be surpassed by an advanced yet practically implementable quantum receiver technique. In this work, we answer this quest by proposing a full-stack quantum receiver that integrates front-end quantum sensing with back-end quantum signal processing. The proposed technique leverages simple qubit ensembles without using any complex entanglement resources to parallelly extract interfering multiuser signals, with a channel capacity beyond the limit of SIC in some operational corners. In performance evaluation, we report notable quantum advantage over the ultimate multiple-access channel capacity limit and practical SIC algorithms in low-SNR regimes in terms of spectral efficiency and detection efficiency due to the receiver's ability to exploit quantum correlated measurements and superposition-enabled parallel processing.