Massive number of internet of things (IoT) devices are expected to simultaneously connect to the mMTC and beyond future generations of wireless network, posing severe challenge to aspects such as RACH procedure, user equipment detection and channel estimation. Although spatial combining has provided significant gains in conventional grant-based transmission, this technique is stuck in dilemma when it comes to autonomous grant-free transmission tailored for IoT use cases. To address this, blind

more »

... patial combining and its incorporation in the data-only MUD are elaborated in this paper answering to both the academic and industry's concern in the overloading potential of autonomous grant-free (AGF) transmission. Blind spatial combining could be interpreted as blind receive beamforming heuristically. Simulation results show that the blind spatial combining enhanced data-only MUD performance for AGF transmission is rather impressive.