Quasi-Dynamic Frame Coordination For Ultra- Reliability and Low-Latency in 5G TDD Systems

The fifth generation (5G) mobile technology features the ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) as a major service class. URLLC applications demand a tight radio latency with extreme link reliability. In 5G dynamic time division duplexing (TDD) systems, URLLC requirements become further challenging to achieve due to the severe and fast-varying cross link interference (CLI) and the switching time of the radio frame configurations (RFCs). In this work, we propose a quasi-dynamic inter-cell frame coordination algorithm using hybrid frame design and a cyclic-offset-based RFC code-book. The proposed solution adaptively updates the RFCs in time such that both the average CLI and the user-centric radio latency are minimized. Compared to state-of-the-art dynamic TDD studies, the proposed scheme shows a significant improvement in the URLLC outage latency, i.e., 92% reduction gain, while boosting the cell-edge capacity by 189% and with a greatly reduced coordination overhead space, limited to B-bit

Ubiquitous Cell-Free Massive MIMO Communications

Since the first cellular networks were trialled in the 1970s, we have witnessed an incredible wireless revolution. From 1G to 4G, the massive traffic growth has been managed by a combination of wider bandwidths, refined radio interfaces, and network densification, namely increasing the number of antennas per site. Due its cost-efficiency, the latter has contributed the most. Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a key 5G technology that uses massive antenna arrays to provide a very high beamforming gain and spatially multiplexing of users, and hence, increases the spectral and energy efficiency. It constitutes a centralized solution to densify a network, and its performance is limited by the inter-cell interference inherent in its cell-centric design. Conversely, ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system implementing coherent user-centric transmission to overcome the inter-cell interference limitation in cellular networks and provide additional macro-diversity. These features, combined with the system scalability inherent in the Massive MIMO design, distinguishes ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO from prior coordinated distributed wireless systems. In this article, we investigate the enormous potential of this promising technology while addressing practical deployment issues to deal with the increased back/front-hauling overhead deriving from the signal co-processing.Comment: Published in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking on August 5, 201