A Low-Complexity Precoding Scheme for the Downlink of Multi-Cell Multi-User MIMO AF System

Because of its simplicity, amplify-and-forward (AF) is one of the most popular cooperative relaying technique. Relays are used in cooperative communication to improve reliability, coverage or spectral efficiency of cell-edge users. However, relays tend to increase the interferences seen by users of adjacent cells, particularly by the cell-edge users, when used in multi-cell systems. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity precoding scheme to mitigate the effect of other-cell interference (OCI) in cooperative communication. The scheme is designed by taking into account the interference plus noise covariance matrix of each user for mitigating the interference at each receiver by means of precoding at the relay node. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, both in terms of sum-rate and computational complexity, when compared to other existing OCI-aware precoding algorithms for AF

A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

Cognitive Orthogonal Precoder for Two-tiered Networks Deployment

In this work, the problem of cross-tier interference in a two-tiered (macro-cell and cognitive small-cells) network, under the complete spectrum sharing paradigm, is studied. A new orthogonal precoder transmit scheme for the small base stations, called multi-user Vandermonde-subspace frequency division multiplexing (MU-VFDM), is proposed. MU-VFDM allows several cognitive small base stations to coexist with legacy macro-cell receivers, by nulling the small- to macro-cell cross-tier interference, without any cooperation between the two tiers. This cleverly designed cascaded precoder structure, not only cancels the cross-tier interference, but avoids the co-tier interference for the small-cell network. The achievable sum-rate of the small-cell network, satisfying the interference cancelation requirements, is evaluated for perfect and imperfect channel state information at the transmitter. Simulation results for the cascaded MU-VFDM precoder show a comparable performance to that of state-of-the-art dirty paper coding technique, for the case of a dense cellular layout. Finally, a comparison between MU-VFDM and a standard complete spectrum separation strategy is proposed. Promising gains in terms of achievable sum-rate are shown for the two-tiered network w.r.t. the traditional bandwidth management approach.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted and to appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications: Cognitive Radio Series, 2013. Copyright transferred to IEE

Sum Rate and Fairness Analysis for the MU-MIMO Downlink under PSK Signalling: Interference Suppression vs Exploitation

In this paper, we analyze the sum rate performance of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems, with a finite constellation phase-shift keying (PSK) input alphabet. We analytically calculate and compare the achievable sum rate in three downlink transmission scenarios: 1) without precoding, 2) with zero forcing (ZF) precoding 3) with closed form constructive interference (CI) precoding technique. In light of this, new analytical expressions for the average sum rate are derived in the three cases, and Monte Carlo simulations are provided throughout to validate the analysis. Furthermore, based on the derived expressions, a power allocation scheme that can ensure fairness among the users is also proposed. The results in this work demonstrate that, the CI strictly outperforms the other two schemes, and the performance gap between the considered schemes increases with increase in the MIMO size. In addition, the CI provides higher fairness and the power allocation algorithm proposed in this paper can achieve maximum fairness index

Employing Antenna Selection to Improve Energy-Efficiency in Massive MIMO Systems

Massive MIMO systems promise high data rates by employing large number of antennas, which also increases the power usage of the system as a consequence. This creates an optimization problem which specifies how many antennas the system should employ in order to operate with maximal energy efficiency. Our main goal is to consider a base station with a fixed number of antennas, such that the system can operate with a smaller subset of antennas according to the number of active user terminals, which may vary over time. Thus, in this paper we propose an antenna selection algorithm which selects the best antennas according to the better channel conditions with respect to the users, aiming at improving the overall energy efficiency. Then, due to the complexity of the mathematical formulation, a tight approximation for the consumed power is presented, using the Wishart theorem, and it is used to find a deterministic formulation for the energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the approximation is quite tight and that there is significant improvement in terms of energy efficiency when antenna selection is employed.Comment: To appear in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 12 pages, 8 figures, 2 table