An Uplink Interference Analysis for Massive MIMO Systems with MRC and ZF Receivers

This paper considers an uplink cellular system, in which each base station (BS) is equipped with a large number of antennas to serve multiple single-antenna user equipments (UEs) simultaneously. Uplink training with pilot reusing is adopted to acquire the channel state information (CSI) and maximum ratio combining (MRC) or zero forcing (ZF) reception is used for handling multiuser interference. Leveraging stochastic geometry to model the spatial distribution of UEs, we analyze the statistical distributions of the interferences experienced by a typical uplink: intra-cell interference, inter-cell interference and interference due to pilot contamination. For a practical but still large number of BS antennas, a key observation for MRC reception is that it is the intra-cell interference that accounts for the dominant portion of the total interference. In addition, the interference due to pilot contamination tends to have a much wider distribution range than the inter-cell interference when shadowing is strong, although their mean powers are roughly equal. For ZF reception, on the other hand, we observe a significant reduction of the intra-cell interference compared to MRC reception, while the inter-cell interference and the interference due to pilot contamination remains almost the same, thus demonstrating a substantial superiority over MRC reception.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 201

Power Scaling of Uplink Massive MIMO Systems with Arbitrary-Rank Channel Means

This paper investigates the uplink achievable rates of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems in Ricean fading channels, using maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and zero-forcing (ZF) receivers, assuming perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). In contrast to previous relevant works, the fast fading MIMO channel matrix is assumed to have an arbitrary-rank deterministic component as well as a Rayleigh-distributed random component. We derive tractable expressions for the achievable uplink rate in the large-antenna limit, along with approximating results that hold for any finite number of antennas. Based on these analytical results, we obtain the scaling law that the users' transmit power should satisfy, while maintaining a desirable quality of service. In particular, it is found that regardless of the Ricean $K$-factor, in the case of perfect CSI, the approximations converge to the same constant value as the exact results, as the number of base station antennas, $M$, grows large, while the transmit power of each user can be scaled down proportionally to $1/M$. If CSI is estimated with uncertainty, the same result holds true but only when the Ricean $K$-factor is non-zero. Otherwise, if the channel experiences Rayleigh fading, we can only cut the transmit power of each user proportionally to $1/\sqrt M$. In addition, we show that with an increasing Ricean $K$-factor, the uplink rates will converge to fixed values for both MRC and ZF receivers

On the Performance of MRC Receiver with Unknown Timing Mismatch-A Large Scale Analysis

There has been extensive research on large scale multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems recently. Researchers have shown that there are great opportunities in this area, however, there are many obstacles in the way to achieve full potential of using large number of receive antennas. One of the main issues, which will be investigated thoroughly in this paper, is timing asynchrony among signals of different users. Most of the works in the literature, assume that received signals are perfectly aligned which is not practical. We show that, neglecting the asynchrony can significantly degrade the performance of existing designs, particularly maximum ratio combining (MRC). We quantify the uplink achievable rates obtained by MRC receiver with perfect channel state information (CSI) and imperfect CSI while the system is impaired by unknown time delays among received signals. We then use these results to design new algorithms in order to alleviate the effects of timing mismatch. We also analyze the performance of introduced receiver design, which is called MRC-ZF, with perfect and imperfect CSI. For performing MRC-ZF, the only required information is the distribution of timing mismatch which circumvents the necessity of time delay acquisition or synchronization. To verify our analytical results, we present extensive simulation results which thoroughly investigate the performance of the traditional MRC receiver and the introduced MRC-ZF receiver