Performance of multiple-input multiple-output wireless communications systems using distributed antennas

In this contribution we propose and investigate a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications system, where multiple receive antennas are distributed in the area covered by a cellular cell and connected with the base-station (BS). We first analyze the total received power by the BS through the distributed antennas, when assuming that the mobile's signal is transmitted over lognormal shadowed Rayleigh fading channels. Then, the outage probability of the distributed antenna MIMO systems is investigated, when considering various antenna distribution patterns. Furthermore, space-time coding at the mobile transmitter is considered for enhancing the outage performance of the distributed antenna MIMO system. Our study and simulation results show that the outage performance of a distributed antenna MIMO system can be significantly improved, when either increasing the number of distributed receive antennas or increasing the number of mobile transmit antennas

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

On Detection Issues in the SC-based Uplink of a MU-MIMO System with a Large Number of BS Antennas

This paper deals with SC/FDE within a MU-MIMO system where a large number of BS antennas is adopted. In this context, either linear or reduced-complexity iterative DF detection techniques are considered. Regarding performance evaluation by simulation, appropriate semi-analytical methods are proposed. This paper includes a detailed evaluation of BER performances for uncoded 4-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (4-QAM) schemes and a MU-MIMO channel with uncorrelated Rayleigh fading. The accuracy of performance results obtained through the semi-analytical simulation methods is assessed by means of parallel conventional Monte Carlo simulations, under the assumptions of perfect power control and perfect channel estimation. The performance results are discussed in detail, with the help of selected performance bounds. We emphasize that a moderately large number of BS antennas is enough to closely approximate the SIMO MFB performance, especially when using the suggested low-complexity iterative DF technique, which does not require matrix inversion operations. We also emphasize the achievable "massive MIMO" effects, even for strongly reduced-complexity linear detection techniques, provided that the number of BS antennas is much higher than the number of antennas which are jointly employed in the terminals of the multiple autonomous users.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Base station cooperation in MIMO-aided multi-user multi-cell systems employing distributed probabilistic data association based soft reception

Inter-cell co-channel interference (CCI) mitigation is investigated in the context of cellular systems relying on dense frequency reuse. A distributed Base Station (BS) cooperation aided soft reception scheme using the Probabilistic Data Association (PDA) algorithm and Soft Combining (SC) is proposed for the uplink of multi-user multi-cell MIMO systems. The realistic hexagonal cellular model relying on unity Frequency Reuse (FR) is considered, where both the BSs and the Mobile Stations (MSs) are equipped with multiple antennas. Local cooperation based message passing is used instead of a global message passing chain for the sake of reducing the backhaul traffic. The PDA algorithm is employed as a low complexity solution for producing soft information, which facilitates the employment of SC at the individual BSs in order to generate the final soft decision metric. Our simulations and analysis demonstrate that despite its low additional complexity and backhaul traffic, the proposed distributed PDA-aided reception scheme significantly outperforms the conventional non-cooperative bench markers

On the distribution of an effective channel estimator for multi-cell massive MIMO

Accurate channel estimation is of utmost importance for massive MIMO systems to provide significant improvements in spectral and energy efficiency. In this work, we present a study on the distribution of a simple but yet effective and practical channel estimator for multi-cell massive MIMO systems suffering from pilot-contamination. The proposed channel estimator performs well under moderate to aggressive pilot contamination scenarios without previous knowledge of the inter-cell large-scale channel coefficients and noise power, asymptotically approximating the performance of the linear MMSE estimator as the number of antennas increases. We prove that the distribution of the proposed channel estimator can be accurately approximated by the circularly-symmetric complex normal distribution, when the number of antennas, M, deployed at the base station is greater than 10