Flexible multi-base-station cooperation towards 6G: a fully decoupled feedback-free access approach

Flexible cooperation among base stations is essential for improving resource utilization and meeting increasingly personalized demands in future sixth-generation networks. However, its practical realization is fundamentally limited by the legacy radio access network architecture, which tightly couples uplink and downlink operations and relies heavily on explicit channel state information feedback. Here we show that a fully decoupled radio access network, in which uplink and downlink transmissions operate independently, can enable flexible multi-base-station cooperation by feedback-free resource scheduling. We formulate scheduling problems under two network regimes. In heavy-load states, our optimal greedy algorithm maximizes the weighted sum of user demand satisfaction rates. In light-load states, our optimal two-stage scheduling algorithm meets all user demands while minimizing network energy consumption by exploiting cooperation flexibility. Extensive simulations demonstrate the superiority of proposed algorithms in performance and running time. Our prototyping implementation further validates the practicality of the proposed feedback-free approach, providing a path toward deployable and scalable multi-base-station cooperation in sixth-generation wireless systems. Jingbo Liu and colleagues develop a feedback-free approach for flexible multi-base-station cooperation towards 6G networks. They show that scheduling without channel state information feedback enables cooperative transmission while optimizing resource utilization according to network load, as supported by simulations and prototype validation.