Performance Evaluation of Hybrid Precoder Design for Multi-User Massive MIMO Systems with Low-Resolution ADCs/DACs

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis and design of a hybrid precoding system tailored for mmWave multi-user massive MIMO systems in both downlink and uplink scenarios. The proposed system employs a two-stage precoding approach, incorporating UQ and NUQ techniques, along with low-resolution DACs in downlink and ADCs in uplink to address hardware limitations. The system considers Zero Forcing and Minimum Mean Square Error algorithms as digital precoding methods for the uplink scenario, while exploring the impact of different DAC resolutions on system performance. Extensive simulations reveal that the proposed system surpasses conventional analog beamforming methods, particularly in multi-user scenarios involving inter-user interference. In downlink, the system demonstrates a trade-off between SE and EE, achieving higher Energy Efficiency with NUQ. In uplink, NUQ and UQ converters exhibit similar performance trends regardless of the chosen combiner algorithm. The proposed system attains enhanced Spectral and Energy Efficiency while maintaining reduced complexity and overhead. The study significantly contributes to the advancement of efficient and effective mmWave multi-user massive MIMO systems by providing a thorough analysis of various quantization schemes and precoding techniques. The findings of this research are expected to aid in the optimization of 5G and beyond technologies, particularly in high-density deployment scenarios

Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or "promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality. Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun. The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO, Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin

Low complexity detection for SC-FDE massive MIMO systems

Nowadays we continue to observe a big and fast growth of wireless com-munication usage due to the increasing number of access points, and fields of application of this technology. Furthermore, these new usages can require higher speed and better quality of service in order to create market. As example we can have: live 4K video transmission, M2M (Machine to Machine communication), IoT (Internet of Things), Tactile Internet, between many others. As a consequence of all these factors, the spectrum is getting overloaded with communications, increasing the interference and affecting the system's per-formance. Therefore a different path of ideas has been followed and the commu-nication process has been taken to the next level in 5G by the usage of big arrays of antennas and multi-stream communication (MIMO systems) which in a greater scale are called massive MIMO schemes. These systems can be combined with an SC-FDE (Single-Carrier Frequency Domain Equalization) scheme to im-prove the power efficiency due to the low envelope fluctuations. This thesis focused on the equalization in massive MIMO systems, more specifically in the FDE (Frequency Domain Equalization), studying the perfor-mance of different approaches, namely ZF (Zero Forcing), EGD (Equal Gain De-tector), MRD (Maximum Ratio Detector), IB-DFE (Iterative Block Decision Feed-back Equalizer) and a proposed receiver combining MRD (or EGD) and IB-DFE.With this approach we want to minimize the ICI (Inter Carrier Interference) in order to have almost independent data streams and to produce a low complexity code, so that the receiver's performance doesn't affect the total system's perfor-mance, with a final objective of increasing the data throughput in a great scale

One-Bit Massive MIMO: Channel Estimation and High-Order Modulations

We investigate the information-theoretic throughout achievable on a fading communication link when the receiver is equipped with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The analysis is conducted for the setting where neither the transmitter nor the receiver have a priori information on the realization of the fading channels. This means that channel-state information needs to be acquired at the receiver on the basis of the one-bit quantized channel outputs. We show that least-squares (LS) channel estimation combined with joint pilot and data processing is capacity achieving in the single-user, single-receive-antenna case. We also investigate the achievable uplink throughput in a massive multiple-input multiple-output system where each element of the antenna array at the receiver base-station feeds a one-bit ADC. We show that LS channel estimation and maximum-ratio combining are sufficient to support both multiuser operation and the use of high-order constellations. This holds in spite of the severe nonlinearity introduced by the one-bit ADCs