326 research outputs found
A Practical Cooperative Multicell MIMO-OFDMA Network Based on Rank Coordination
An important challenge of wireless networks is to boost the cell edge
performance and enable multi-stream transmissions to cell edge users.
Interference mitigation techniques relying on multiple antennas and
coordination among cells are nowadays heavily studied in the literature.
Typical strategies in OFDMA networks include coordinated scheduling,
beamforming and power control. In this paper, we propose a novel and practical
type of coordination for OFDMA downlink networks relying on multiple antennas
at the transmitter and the receiver. The transmission ranks, i.e.\ the number
of transmitted streams, and the user scheduling in all cells are jointly
optimized in order to maximize a network utility function accounting for
fairness among users. A distributed coordinated scheduler motivated by an
interference pricing mechanism and relying on a master-slave architecture is
introduced. The proposed scheme is operated based on the user report of a
recommended rank for the interfering cells accounting for the receiver
interference suppression capability. It incurs a very low feedback and backhaul
overhead and enables efficient link adaptation. It is moreover robust to
channel measurement errors and applicable to both open-loop and closed-loop
MIMO operations. A 20% cell edge performance gain over uncoordinated LTE-A
system is shown through system level simulations.Comment: IEEE Transactions or Wireless Communications, Accepted for
Publicatio
Achieving "Massive MIMO" Spectral Efficiency with a Not-so-Large Number of Antennas
The main focus and contribution of this paper is a novel network-MIMO TDD
architecture that achieves spectral efficiencies comparable with "Massive
MIMO", with one order of magnitude fewer antennas per active user per cell. The
proposed architecture is based on a family of network-MIMO schemes defined by
small clusters of cooperating base stations, zero-forcing multiuser MIMO
precoding with suitable inter-cluster interference constraints, uplink pilot
signals reuse across cells, and frequency reuse. The key idea consists of
partitioning the users population into geographically determined "bins", such
that all users in the same bin are statistically equivalent, and use the
optimal network-MIMO architecture in the family for each bin. A scheduler takes
care of serving the different bins on the time-frequency slots, in order to
maximize a desired network utility function that captures some desired notion
of fairness. This results in a mixed-mode network-MIMO architecture, where
different schemes, each of which is optimized for the served user bin, are
multiplexed in time-frequency. In order to carry out the performance analysis
and the optimization of the proposed architecture in a clean and
computationally efficient way, we consider the large-system regime where the
number of users, the number of antennas, and the channel coherence block length
go to infinity with fixed ratios. The performance predicted by the large-system
asymptotic analysis matches very well the finite-dimensional simulations.
Overall, the system spectral efficiency obtained by the proposed architecture
is similar to that achieved by "Massive MIMO", with a 10-fold reduction in the
number of antennas at the base stations (roughly, from 500 to 50 antennas).Comment: Full version with appendice (proofs of theorems). A shortened version
without appendice was submitted to IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun. Appendix B
was revised after submissio
Large-Scale MIMO versus Network MIMO for Multicell Interference Mitigation
This paper compares two important downlink multicell interference mitigation
techniques, namely, large-scale (LS) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and
network MIMO. We consider a cooperative wireless cellular system operating in
time-division duplex (TDD) mode, wherein each cooperating cluster includes
base-stations (BSs), each equipped with multiple antennas and scheduling
single-antenna users. In an LS-MIMO system, each BS employs antennas not
only to serve its scheduled users, but also to null out interference caused to
the other users within the cooperating cluster using zero-forcing (ZF)
beamforming. In a network MIMO system, each BS is equipped with only
antennas, but interference cancellation is realized by data and channel state
information exchange over the backhaul links and joint downlink transmission
using ZF beamforming. Both systems are able to completely eliminate
intra-cluster interference and to provide the same number of spatial degrees of
freedom per user. Assuming the uplink-downlink channel reciprocity provided by
TDD, both systems are subject to identical channel acquisition overhead during
the uplink pilot transmission stage. Further, the available sum power at each
cluster is fixed and assumed to be equally distributed across the downlink
beams in both systems. Building upon the channel distribution functions and
using tools from stochastic ordering, this paper shows, however, that from a
performance point of view, users experience better quality of service, averaged
over small-scale fading, under an LS-MIMO system than a network MIMO system.
Numerical simulations for a multicell network reveal that this conclusion also
holds true with regularized ZF beamforming scheme. Hence, given the likely
lower cost of adding excess number of antennas at each BS, LS-MIMO could be the
preferred route toward interference mitigation in cellular networks.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures; IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal
Processing, Special Issue on Signal Processing for Large-Scale MIMO
Communication
Self-organised multi-objective network clustering for coordinated communications in future wireless networks
The fifth generation (5G) cellular system is being developed with a vision of 1000 times more capacity than the fourth generation (4G) systems to cope with ever increasing mobile data traffic. Interference mitigation plays an important role in improving the much needed overall capacity especially in highly interference-limited dense deployment scenarios envisioned for 5G. Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) is identified as a promising interference mitigation technique where multiple base stations (BS) can cooperate for joint transmission/reception by exchanging user/control data and perform joint signal processing to mitigate inter-cell interference and even exploit it as a useful signal. CoMP is already a key feature of long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) and envisioned as an essential function for 5G. However, CoMP cannot be realized for the whole network due to its computational complexity, synchronization requirement between coordinating BSs and high backhaul capacity requirement. BSs need to be clustered into smaller groups and CoMP can be activated within these smaller clusters.
This PhD thesis aims to investigate optimum dynamic CoMP clustering solutions in 5G and beyond wireless networks with massive small cell (SC) deployment. Truly self-organised CoMP clustering algorithms are investigated, aiming to improve much needed spectral efficiency and other network objectives especially load balancing in future wireless networks. Low complexity, scalable, stable and efficient CoMP clustering algorithms are designed to jointly optimize spectral efficiency, load balancing and limited backhaul availability.
Firstly, we provide a self organizing, load aware, user-centric CoMP clustering algorithm in a control and data plane separation architecture (CDSA) proposed for 5G to maximize spectral efficiency and improve load balancing. We introduce a novel re-clustering algorithm for user equipment (UE) served by highly loaded cells and show that unsatisfied UEs due to high load can be significantly reduced with minimal impact on spectral efficiency. Clustering with load balancing algorithm exploits the capacity gain from increase in cluster size and also the traffic shift from highly loaded cells to lightly loaded neighbours.
Secondly, we develop a novel, low complexity, stable, network-centric clustering model to jointly optimize load balancing and spectral efficiency objectives and tackle the complexity and scalability issues of user-centric clustering. We show that our clustering model provide high spectral efficiency in low-load scenario and better load distribution in high-load scenario resulting in lower number of unsatisfied users while keeping spectral efficiency at comparably high levels. Unsatisfied UEs due to high load are reduced by with our algorithm when compared to greedy clustering model. In this context, the unique contribution of this work that it is the first attempt to fill the gap in literature for multi-objective, network-centric CoMP clustering, jointly optimizing load balancing and spectral efficiency.
Thirdly, we design a novel multi-objective CoMP clustering algorithm to include backhaul-load awareness and tackle one of the biggest challenges for the realization of CoMP in future networks i.e. the demand for high backhaul bandwidth and very low latency. We fill the gap in literature as the first attempt to design a clustering algorithm to jointly optimize backhaul/radio access load and spectral efficiency and analyze the trade-off between them. We employ 2 novel coalitional game theoretic clustering methods, 1-a novel merge/split/transfer coalitional game theoretic clustering algorithm to form backhaul and load aware BS clusters where spectral efficiency is still kept at high level, 2-a novel user transfer game model to move users between clusters to improve load balancing further. Stability and complexity analysis is provided and simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed method under different backhaul availability scenarios. We show that average system throughout is increased by 49.9% with our backhaul-load aware model in high load scenario when compared to a greedy model.
Finally, we provide an operator's perspective on deployment of CoMP. Firstly, we present the main motivation and benefits of CoMP from an operator's viewpoint. Next, we present operational requirements for CoMP implementation and discuss practical considerations and challenges of such deployment. Possible solutions for these experienced challenges are reviewed. We then present initial results from a UL CoMP trial and discuss changes in key network performance indicators (KPI) during the trial. Additionally, we propose further improvements to the trialed CoMP scheme for better potential gains and give our perspective on how CoMP will fit into the future wireless networks
- …