1,206 research outputs found
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
Advanced Quantizer Designs for FDD-Based FD-MIMO Systems Using Uniform Planar Arrays
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which utilize a large
number of antennas at the base station, are expected to enhance network
throughput by enabling improved multiuser MIMO techniques. To deploy many
antennas in reasonable form factors, base stations are expected to employ
antenna arrays in both horizontal and vertical dimensions, which is known as
full-dimension (FD) MIMO. The most popular two-dimensional array is the uniform
planar array (UPA), where antennas are placed in a grid pattern. To exploit the
full benefit of massive MIMO in frequency division duplexing (FDD), the
downlink channel state information (CSI) should be estimated, quantized, and
fed back from the receiver to the transmitter. However, it is difficult to
accurately quantize the channel in a computationally efficient manner due to
the high dimensionality of the massive MIMO channel. In this paper, we develop
both narrowband and wideband CSI quantizers for FD-MIMO taking the properties
of realistic channels and the UPA into consideration. To improve quantization
quality, we focus on not only quantizing dominant radio paths in the channel,
but also combining the quantized beams. We also develop a hierarchical beam
search approach, which scans both vertical and horizontal domains jointly with
moderate computational complexity. Numerical simulations verify that the
performance of the proposed quantizers is better than that of previous CSI
quantization techniques.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure
Advanced Coordinated Beamforming for the Downlink of Future LTE Cellular Networks
Modern cellular networks in traditional frequency bands are notoriously
interference-limited especially in urban areas, where base stations are
deployed in close proximity to one another. The latest releases of Long Term
Evolution (LTE) incorporate features for coordinating downlink transmissions as
an efficient means of managing interference. Recent field trial results and
theoretical studies of the performance of joint transmission (JT) coordinated
multi-point (CoMP) schemes revealed, however, that their gains are not as high
as initially expected, despite the large coordination overhead. These schemes
are known to be very sensitive to defects in synchronization or information
exchange between coordinating bases stations as well as uncoordinated
interference. In this article, we review recent advanced coordinated
beamforming (CB) schemes as alternatives, requiring less overhead than JT CoMP
while achieving good performance in realistic conditions. By stipulating that,
in certain LTE scenarios of increasing interest, uncoordinated interference
constitutes a major factor in the performance of CoMP techniques at large, we
hereby assess the resilience of the state-of-the-art CB to uncoordinated
interference. We also describe how these techniques can leverage the latest
specifications of current cellular networks, and how they may perform when we
consider standardized feedback and coordination. This allows us to identify
some key roadblocks and research directions to address as LTE evolves towards
the future of mobile communications.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, accepted to IEEE Communications Magazin
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