Ubiquitous Cell-Free Massive MIMO Communications

Since the first cellular networks were trialled in the 1970s, we have witnessed an incredible wireless revolution. From 1G to 4G, the massive traffic growth has been managed by a combination of wider bandwidths, refined radio interfaces, and network densification, namely increasing the number of antennas per site. Due its cost-efficiency, the latter has contributed the most. Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a key 5G technology that uses massive antenna arrays to provide a very high beamforming gain and spatially multiplexing of users, and hence, increases the spectral and energy efficiency. It constitutes a centralized solution to densify a network, and its performance is limited by the inter-cell interference inherent in its cell-centric design. Conversely, ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system implementing coherent user-centric transmission to overcome the inter-cell interference limitation in cellular networks and provide additional macro-diversity. These features, combined with the system scalability inherent in the Massive MIMO design, distinguishes ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO from prior coordinated distributed wireless systems. In this article, we investigate the enormous potential of this promising technology while addressing practical deployment issues to deal with the increased back/front-hauling overhead deriving from the signal co-processing.Comment: Published in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking on August 5, 201

Millimetre wave frequency band as a candidate spectrum for 5G network architecture : a survey

In order to meet the huge growth in global mobile data traffic in 2020 and beyond, the development of the 5th Generation (5G) system is required as the current 4G system is expected to fall short of the provision needed for such growth. 5G is anticipated to use a higher carrier frequency in the millimetre wave (mm-wave) band, within the 20 to 90 GHz, due to the availability of a vast amount of unexploited bandwidth. It is a revolutionary step to use these bands because of their different propagation characteristics, severe atmospheric attenuation, and hardware constraints. In this paper, we carry out a survey of 5G research contributions and proposed design architectures based on mm-wave communications. We present and discuss the use of mm-wave as indoor and outdoor mobile access, as a wireless backhaul solution, and as a key enabler for higher order sectorisation. Wireless standards such as IEE802.11ad, which are operating in mm-wave band have been presented. These standards have been designed for short range, ultra high data throughput systems in the 60 GHz band. Furthermore, this survey provides new insights regarding relevant and open issues in adopting mm-wave for 5G networks. This includes increased handoff rate and interference in Ultra-Dense Network (UDN), waveform consideration with higher spectral efficiency, and supporting spatial multiplexing in mm-wave line of sight. This survey also introduces a distributed base station architecture in mm-wave as an approach to address increased handoff rate in UDN, and to provide an alternative way for network densification in a time and cost effective manner

Channel estimation in massive MIMO systems

Last years were characterized by a great demand for high data throughput, good quality and spectral efficiency in wireless communication systems. Consequently, a revolution in cellular networks has been set in motion towards to 5G. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the new concepts in 5G and the idea is to scale up the known MIMO systems in unprecedented proportions, by deploying hundreds of antennas at base stations. Although, perfect channel knowledge is crucial in these systems for user and data stream separation in order to cancel interference. The most common way to estimate the channel is based on pilots. However, problems such as interference and pilot contamination (PC) can arise due to the multiplicity of channels in the wireless link. Therefore, it is crucial to define techniques for channel estimation that together with pilot contamination mitigation allow best system performance and at same time low complexity. This work introduces a low-complexity channel estimation technique based on Zadoff-Chu training sequences. In addition, different approaches were studied towards pilot contamination mitigation and low complexity schemes, with resort to iterative channel estimation methods, semi-blind subspace tracking techniques and matrix inversion substitutes. System performance simulations were performed for the several proposed techniques in order to identify the best tradeoff between complexity, spectral efficiency and system performance

Massive MIMO 시스템을 위한 채널 추정 및 피드백 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2017. 2. 이정우.To meet the demand of high throughput in next generation wireless systems, various directions for physical layer evolution are being explored. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, characterized by a large number of antennas at the transmitter, are expected to become a key enabler for spectral efficiency improvement. In massive MIMO systems, thanks to the orthogonality between different users' channels, high spectral and energy efficiency can be achieved through simple signal processing techniques. However, to get such advantages, accurate channel state information (CSI) needs to be available, and acquiring CSI in massive MIMO systems is challenging due to the increased channel dimension. In frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems, where CSI at the transmitter is achieved through downlink training and uplink feedback, the overhead for the training and feedback increases proportionally to the number of antennas, and the resource for data transmission becomes scarce in massive MIMO systems. In time division duplexing (TDD) systems, where the channel reciprocity holds and the downlink CSI can be obtained through uplink training, pilot contamination due to correlated pilots becomes a performance bottleneck when the number of antennas increases. In this dissertation, I propose efficient CSI acquisition techniques for various massive MIMO systems. First, I develop a downlink training technique for FDD massive MIMO systems, which estimates the downlink channel with small overhead. To this end, compressed sensing tools are utilized, and the training overhead can be highly reduced by exploiting the previous channel information. Next, a limited feedback scheme is developed for FDD massive MIMO systems. The proposed scheme reduces the feedback overhead using a dimension reduction technique that exploits spatial and temporal correlation of the channel. Lastly, I analyze the effect of pilot contamination, which has been regarded as a performance bottleneck in multi-cell massive MIMO systems, and propose two uplink training strategies. An iterative pilot design scheme is developed for small networks, and a scalable training framework is also proposed for networks with many cells.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Massive MIMO 1 1.2 CSI Acquisition in Massive MIMO Systems 3 1.3 Contributions and Organization 6 1.4 Notations 7 2 Compressed Sensing-Aided Downlink Training 9 2.1 Introduction 10 2.2 System Model 13 2.2.1 Channel Model 13 2.2.2 Downlink Channel Estimation 16 2.3 CS-Aided Channel Training 19 2.3.1 Training Sequence Design 20 2.3.2 Channel Estimation 21 2.3.3 Estimation Error 23 2.4 Discussions 26 2.4.1 Design of Measurement Matrix 26 2.4.2 Extension to MIMO Systems 27 2.4.3 Comparison to CS with Partial Support Information 28 2.5 Simulation Results 29 2.6 Conclusion 37 3 Projection-Based Differential Feedback 39 3.1 Introduction 40 3.2 System Model 44 3.2.1 Multi-User Beamforming with Limited Feedback 45 3.2.2 Massive MIMO Channel 47 3.3 Projection-Based Differential Feedback 48 3.3.1 Projection-Based Differential Feedback Framework 48 3.3.2 Projection for PBDF Framework 51 3.3.3 Efficient Algorithm 57 3.4 Discussions 58 3.4.1 Projection with Imperfect CSIR 58 3.4.2 Acquisition of Channel Statistics 61 3.5 Simulation Results 62 3.6 Conclusion 69 4 Mitigating Pilot Contamination via Pilot Design 71 4.1 Introduction 72 4.2 System Model 73 4.2.1 Multi-cell Massive MIMO Systems 74 4.2.2 Uplink Channel Training 75 4.2.3 Data Transmission 77 4.3 Iterative Pilot Design Algorithm 78 4.3.1 Algorithm 79 4.3.2 Proof of Convergence 81 4.4 Generalized Pilot Reuse 81 4.4.1 Concept of Pilot Reuse Schemes 81 4.4.2 Pilot Design based on Grassmannian Subspace Packing 82 4.5 Simulation Results 85 4.5.1 Iterative Pilot Design 85 4.5.2 Generalized Pilot Reuse 87 4.6 Conclusion 89 5 Conclusion 91 5.1 Summary 91 5.2 Future Directions 93 Bibliography 96 Abstract (In Korean) 109Docto