Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example, prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin

SVM-Based Channel Estimation and Data Detection for One-Bit Massive MIMO systems

The use of low-resolution Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) is a practical solution for reducing cost and power consumption for massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems. However, the severe nonlinearity of low-resolution ADCs causes significant distortions in the received signals and makes the channel estimation and data detection tasks much more challenging. In this paper, we show how Support Vector Machine (SVM), a well-known supervised-learning technique in machine learning, can be exploited to provide efficient and robust channel estimation and data detection in massive MIMO systems with one-bit ADCs. First, the problem of channel estimation for uncorrelated channels is formulated as a conventional SVM problem. The objective function of this SVM problem is then modified for estimating spatially correlated channels. Next, a two-stage detection algorithm is proposed where SVM is further exploited in the first stage. The performance of the proposed data detection method is very close to that of Maximum-Likelihood (ML) data detection when the channel is perfectly known. We also propose an SVM-based joint Channel Estimation and Data Detection (CE-DD) method, which makes use of both the to-be-decoded data vectors and the pilot data vectors to improve the estimation and detection performance. Finally, an extension of the proposed methods to OFDM systems with frequency-selective fading channels is presented. Simulation results show that the proposed methods are efficient and robust, and also outperform existing ones

A Reduced Complexity Ungerboeck Receiver for Quantized Wideband Massive SC-MIMO

Employing low resolution analog-to-digital converters in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has many advantages in terms of total power consumption, cost and feasibility of such systems. However, such advantages come together with significant challenges in channel estimation and data detection due to the severe quantization noise present. In this study, we propose a novel iterative receiver for quantized uplink single carrier MIMO (SC-MIMO) utilizing an efficient message passing algorithm based on the Bussgang decomposition and Ungerboeck factorization, which avoids the use of a complex whitening filter. A reduced state sequence estimator with bidirectional decision feedback is also derived, achieving remarkable complexity reduction compared to the existing receivers for quantized SC-MIMO in the literature, without any requirement on the sparsity of the transmission channel. Moreover, the linear minimum mean-square-error (LMMSE) channel estimator for SC-MIMO under frequency-selective channel, which do not require any cyclic-prefix overhead, is also derived. We observe that the proposed receiver has significant performance gains with respect to the existing receivers in the literature under imperfect channel state information.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl