Hybrid Beamforming via the Kronecker Decomposition for the Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Despite its promising performance gain, the realization of mmWave massive MIMO still faces several practical challenges. In particular, implementing massive MIMO in the digital domain requires hundreds of RF chains matching the number of antennas. Furthermore, designing these components to operate at the mmWave frequencies is challenging and costly. These motivated the recent development of hybrid-beamforming where MIMO processing is divided for separate implementation in the analog and digital domains, called the analog and digital beamforming, respectively. Analog beamforming using a phase array introduces uni-modulus constraints on the beamforming coefficients, rendering the conventional MIMO techniques unsuitable and call for new designs. In this paper, we present a systematic design framework for hybrid beamforming for multi-cell multiuser massive MIMO systems over mmWave channels characterized by sparse propagation paths. The framework relies on the decomposition of analog beamforming vectors and path observation vectors into Kronecker products of factors being uni-modulus vectors. Exploiting properties of Kronecker mixed products, different factors of the analog beamformer are designed for either nulling interference paths or coherently combining data paths. Furthermore, a channel estimation scheme is designed for enabling the proposed hybrid beamforming. The scheme estimates the AoA of data and interference paths by analog beam scanning and data-path gains by analog beam steering. The performance of the channel estimation scheme is analyzed. In particular, the AoA spectrum resulting from beam scanning, which displays the magnitude distribution of paths over the AoA range, is derived in closed-form. It is shown that the inter-cell interference level diminishes inversely with the array size, the square root of pilot sequence length and the spatial separation between paths.Comment: Submitted to IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Millimeter Wave Communications for Future Mobile Networks, minor revisio

Near-Instantaneously Adaptive HSDPA-Style OFDM Versus MC-CDMA Transceivers for WIFI, WIMAX, and Next-Generation Cellular Systems

Burts-by-burst (BbB) adaptive high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) style multicarrier systems are reviewed, identifying their most critical design aspects. These systems exhibit numerous attractive features, rendering them eminently eligible for employment in next-generation wireless systems. It is argued that BbB-adaptive or symbol-by-symbol adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) modems counteract the near instantaneous channel quality variations and hence attain an increased throughput or robustness in comparison to their fixed-mode counterparts. Although they act quite differently, various diversity techniques, such as Rake receivers and space-time block coding (STBC) are also capable of mitigating the channel quality variations in their effort to reduce the bit error ratio (BER), provided that the individual antenna elements experience independent fading. By contrast, in the presence of correlated fading imposed by shadowing or time-variant multiuser interference, the benefits of space-time coding erode and it is unrealistic to expect that a fixed-mode space-time coded system remains capable of maintaining a near-constant BER

Analysis and Design of Channel Estimation in Multicell Multiuser MIMO OFDM Systems

This paper investigates the uplink transmission in multicell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The system model considers imperfect channel estimation, pilot contamination (PC), and multicarrier and multipath channels. Analytical expressions are first presented on the mean square error (MSE) of two classical channel estimation algorithms [i.e., least squares (LS) and minimum mean square error (MMSE)] in the presence of PC. Then, a simple H-infinity (H-inf) channel estimation approach is proposed to have good suppression to PC. This approach exploits the space-alternating generalized expectation–maximization (SAGE) iterative process to decompose the multicell multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) problem into a series of single-cell single-user single-input single-output (SISO) problems, which reduces the complexity significantly. According to the analytic results given herein, increasing the number of pilot subcarriers cannot mitigate PC, and a clue for suppressing PC is obtained. It is shown from the results that the H-inf has better suppression capability to PC than classical estimation algorithms. Its performance is close to that of the optimal MMSE as the length of channel impulse response (CIR) is increased. By using the SAGE process, the performance of the H-inf does not degrade when the number of antennas is large at the base station (BS)

A Novel Antenna Selection Scheme for Spatially Correlated Massive MIMO Uplinks with Imperfect Channel Estimation

We propose a new antenna selection scheme for a massive MIMO system with a single user terminal and a base station with a large number of antennas. We consider a practical scenario where there is a realistic correlation among the antennas and imperfect channel estimation at the receiver side. The proposed scheme exploits the sparsity of the channel matrix for the effective selection of a limited number of antennas. To this end, we compute a sparse channel matrix by minimising the mean squared error. This optimisation problem is then solved by the well-known orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Widely used models for spatial correlation among the antennas and channel estimation errors are considered in this work. Simulation results demonstrate that when the impacts of spatial correlation and imperfect channel estimation introduced, the proposed scheme in the paper can significantly reduce complexity of the receiver, without degrading the system performance compared to the maximum ratio combining.Comment: in Proc. IEEE 81st Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC), May 2015, 6 pages, 5 figure

Multiuser MIMO-OFDM for Next-Generation Wireless Systems

This overview portrays the 40-year evolution of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) research. The amelioration of powerful multicarrier OFDM arrangements with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems has numerous benefits, which are detailed in this treatise. We continue by highlighting the limitations of conventional detection and channel estimation techniques designed for multiuser MIMO OFDM systems in the so-called rank-deficient scenarios, where the number of users supported or the number of transmit antennas employed exceeds the number of receiver antennas. This is often encountered in practice, unless we limit the number of users granted access in the base station’s or radio port’s coverage area. Following a historical perspective on the associated design problems and their state-of-the-art solutions, the second half of this treatise details a range of classic multiuser detectors (MUDs) designed for MIMO-OFDM systems and characterizes their achievable performance. A further section aims for identifying novel cutting-edge genetic algorithm (GA)-aided detector solutions, which have found numerous applications in wireless communications in recent years. In an effort to stimulate the cross pollination of ideas across the machine learning, optimization, signal processing, and wireless communications research communities, we will review the broadly applicable principles of various GA-assisted optimization techniques, which were recently proposed also for employment inmultiuser MIMO OFDM. In order to stimulate new research, we demonstrate that the family of GA-aided MUDs is capable of achieving a near-optimum performance at the cost of a significantly lower computational complexity than that imposed by their optimum maximum-likelihood (ML) MUD aided counterparts. The paper is concluded by outlining a range of future research options that may find their way into next-generation wireless systems