Coordinated Multicast Beamforming in Multicell Networks

We study physical layer multicasting in multicell networks where each base station, equipped with multiple antennas, transmits a common message using a single beamformer to multiple users in the same cell. We investigate two coordinated beamforming designs: the quality-of-service (QoS) beamforming and the max-min SINR (signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio) beamforming. The goal of the QoS beamforming is to minimize the total power consumption while guaranteeing that received SINR at each user is above a predetermined threshold. We present a necessary condition for the optimization problem to be feasible. Then, based on the decomposition theory, we propose a novel decentralized algorithm to implement the coordinated beamforming with limited information sharing among different base stations. The algorithm is guaranteed to converge and in most cases it converges to the optimal solution. The max-min SINR (MMS) beamforming is to maximize the minimum received SINR among all users under per-base station power constraints. We show that the MMS problem and a weighted peak-power minimization (WPPM) problem are inverse problems. Based on this inversion relationship, we then propose an efficient algorithm to solve the MMS problem in an approximate manner. Simulation results demonstrate significant advantages of the proposed multicast beamforming algorithms over conventional multicasting schemes.Comment: 10pages, 9 figure

Massive MIMO Multicasting in Noncooperative Cellular Networks

We study the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multicast transmission in cellular networks where each base station (BS) is equipped with a large-scale antenna array and transmits a common message using a single beamformer to multiple mobile users. We first show that when each BS knows the perfect channel state information (CSI) of its own served users, the asymptotically optimal beamformer at each BS is a linear combination of the channel vectors of its multicast users. Moreover, the optimal combining coefficients are obtained in closed form. Then we consider the imperfect CSI scenario where the CSI is obtained through uplink channel estimation in timedivision duplex systems. We propose a new pilot scheme that estimates the composite channel which is a linear combination of the individual channels of multicast users in each cell. This scheme is able to completely eliminate pilot contamination. The pilot power control for optimizing the multicast beamformer at each BS is also derived. Numerical results show that the asymptotic performance of the proposed scheme is close to the ideal case with perfect CSI. Simulation also verifies the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with finite number of antennas at each BS.Comment: to appear in IEEE JSAC Special Issue on 5G Wireless Communication System

General Rank Multiuser Downlink Beamforming With Shaping Constraints Using Real-valued OSTBC

In this paper we consider optimal multiuser downlink beamforming in the presence of a massive number of arbitrary quadratic shaping constraints. We combine beamforming with full-rate high dimensional real-valued orthogonal space time block coding (OSTBC) to increase the number of beamforming weight vectors and associated degrees of freedom in the beamformer design. The original multi-constraint beamforming problem is converted into a convex optimization problem using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) which can be solved efficiently. In contrast to conventional (rank-one) beamforming approaches in which an optimal beamforming solution can be obtained only when the SDR solution (after rank reduction) exhibits the rank-one property, in our approach optimality is guaranteed when a rank of eight is not exceeded. We show that our approach can incorporate up to 79 additional shaping constraints for which an optimal beamforming solution is guaranteed as compared to a maximum of two additional constraints that bound the conventional rank-one downlink beamforming designs. Simulation results demonstrate the flexibility of our proposed beamformer design

Higher-rank Transmit Beamforming Using Space Time Block Coding

With the rapid development of wireless communications, there has been a massive growth in the number of wireless communications users and progressively more new high data rate wireless services will emerge. With these developments taking place, wireless spectral resources are becoming much more scarce and precious. As a result, research on spectrally efficient transmission techniques for current and future communication networks attracts considerable interest. As a promising multi-antenna communication technique, transmit beamforming is widely recognized as being able to improve the capacity of wireless systems without requiring additional spectral resources. In conventional (rank-one) beamforming, each user is served by a single beamformer. For certain transmit beamforming applications, the beamforming performance may be poor if the degrees of freedom in the conventional beamformer design become insufficient. The scope of this thesis is to address the beamforming performance degradation problems induced by the insufficient degrees of freedom in the beamformer design in certain practical scenarios. In this thesis, a fundamentally new idea of higher-rank (>1) transmit beamforming is proposed to improve the beamforming performance. Instead of a single beamformer assigned to each user, multiple beamformers are designed and correspondingly the degrees of freedom in the beamformer design are multiplied, i.e., the increase of the degrees of freedom consists in the increase of the number of design variables. To implement higher-rank beamforming, the central idea is to combine beamforming with different space time block coding (STBC) techniques. Conventionally, STBCs are used to exploit the transmit diversity resulting from the independent fading for different transmit antennas. However, the use of STBCs in the higher-rank beamforming approaches is not for the sake of transmit diversity, but for the sake of design diversity in the sense of degrees of freedom in the beamformer design. The single-group multicast beamforming problem of broadcasting the same information to all users is firstly considered in the thesis. It is assumed that the transmitter knows the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) which describes the short-term channel conditions of a communication link and can be estimated in modern communication systems. In the conventional approach, a single beamforming weight vector is designed to steer the common information to all users. In the case of a large number of users, the performance of the conventional approach usually degrades severely due to the limited degrees of freedom offered by a single beamformer. In order to mitigate this drawback, a rank-two beamforming approach is proposed in which two independent beamforming weight vectors are designed. In the rank-two beamforming approach, single-group multicast beamforming is combined with the two dimentional Alamouti STBC, and each user is simultaneously served with two Alamouti coded symbols from two beamformers. The degrees of freedom in the beamformer design are doubled and significant performance improvement is achieved. The multi-group multicast beamforming problem of transmitting the same information to users in the same group while transmitting independent information to users in different groups, is studied next in the thesis, also assuming that instantaneous CSI is available at the transmitter. The rank-two beamforming approach, originally devised for single-group multicasting networks that are free of multiuser interference, is extended to multi-group multicasting networks, where multiuser interference represents a major challenge. By combining multi-group multicast beamforming with Alamouti STBC, two independent beamforming weight vectors are assigned to each user and the degrees of freedom in the beamformer design are doubled resulting in drastically improved beamforming performance. Then, the multiuser downlink beamforming problem of delivering independent information to different users with additional shaping constraints is investigated in the thesis, also assuming instantaneous CSI at the transmitter. Additional shaping constraints are used to incorporate a variety of requirements in diverse applications. When the number of shaping constraints is large, the degrees of freedom in the beamformer design can be rather deficient. In order to address this problem, a general rank beamforming approach is proposed in which multiuser downlink beamforming is combined with high dimensional (>2) real-valued orthogonal space time block coding (OSTBC). In the general rank beamforming approach, the number of beamforming weight vectors for each user and the associated degrees of freedom in the beamformer design are multiplied by up to eight times, which lead to significantly increased flexibility for the beamformer design. Since instantaneous CSI can be difficult to acquire in certain scenarios, the use of statistical CSI describing the long-term statistical characteristics of the channel can be more practical in these scenarios. The rank-two beamformer designs based on instantaneous CSI can be straightforwardly applied in the case of statistical CSI. However, it is impossible to extend the general rank beamforming approach for the multiuser downlink beamforming problem with additional shaping constraints based on instantaneous CSI to the case of statistical CSI straightforwardly. Therefore, multiuser downlink beamforming with additional shaping constraints using statistical CSI at the transmitter is then studied and an alternative general rank beamforming approach is proposed in the thesis. In the general rank beamforming approach using statistical CSI, multiuser downlink beamforming is combined with quasi-orthogonal space time block coding (QOSTBC). The increased number of beamforming weight vectors and the associated degrees of freedom are much beyond the limits that can be achieved by Alamouti STBC in the beamformer design. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed higher-rank transmit beamforming approaches can achieve significantly improved performance as compared to the existing approaches

Novel transmission and beamforming strategies for multiuser MIMO with various CSIT types

In multiuser multi-antenna wireless systems, the transmission and beamforming strategies that achieve the sum rate capacity depend critically on the acquisition of perfect Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT). Accordingly, a high-rate low-latency feedback link between the receiver and the transmitter is required to keep the latter accurately and instantaneously informed about the CSI. In realistic wireless systems, however, only imperfect CSIT is achievable due to pilot contamination, estimation error, limited feedback and delay, etc. As an intermediate solution, this thesis investigates novel transmission strategies suitable for various imperfect CSIT scenarios and the associated beamforming techniques to optimise the rate performance. First, we consider a two-user Multiple-Input-Single-Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC) under statistical and delayed CSIT. We mainly focus on linear beamforming and power allocation designs for ergodic sum rate maximisation. The proposed designs enable higher sum rate than the conventional designs. Interestingly, we propose a novel transmission framework which makes better use of statistical and delayed CSIT and smoothly bridges between statistical CSIT-based strategies and delayed CSIT-based strategies. Second, we consider a multiuser massive MIMO system under partial and statistical CSIT. In order to tackle multiuser interference incurred by partial CSIT, a Rate-Splitting (RS) transmission strategy has been proposed recently. We generalise the idea of RS into the large-scale array. By further exploiting statistical CSIT, we propose a novel framework Hierarchical-Rate-Splitting that is particularly suited to massive MIMO systems. Third, we consider a multiuser Millimetre Wave (mmWave) system with hybrid analog/digital precoding under statistical and quantised CSIT. We leverage statistical CSIT to design digital precoder for interference mitigation while all feedback overhead is reserved for precise analog beamforming. For very limited feedback and/or very sparse channels, the proposed precoding scheme yields higher sum rate than the conventional precoding schemes under a fixed total feedback constraint. Moreover, a RS transmission strategy is introduced to further tackle the multiuser interference, enabling remarkable saving in feedback overhead compared with conventional transmission strategies. Finally, we investigate the downlink hybrid precoding for physical layer multicasting with a limited number of RF chains. We propose a low complexity algorithm to compute the analog precoder that achieves near-optimal max-min performance. Moreover, we derive a simple condition under which the hybrid precoding driven by a limited number of RF chains incurs no loss of optimality with respect to the fully digital precoding case.Open Acces

Edge-Caching Wireless Networks: Performance Analysis and Optimization

Edge-caching has received much attention as an efficient technique to reduce delivery latency and network congestion during peak-traffic times by bringing data closer to end users. Existing works usually design caching algorithms separately from physical layer design. In this paper, we analyse edge-caching wireless networks by taking into account the caching capability when designing the signal transmission. Particularly, we investigate multi-layer caching where both base station (BS) and users are capable of storing content data in their local cache and analyse the performance of edge-caching wireless networks under two notable uncoded and coded caching strategies. Firstly, we propose a coded caching strategy that is applied to arbitrary values of cache size. The required backhaul and access rates are derived as a function of the BS and user cache size. Secondly, closed-form expressions for the system energy efficiency (EE) corresponding to the two caching methods are derived. Based on the derived formulas, the system EE is maximized via precoding vectors design and optimization while satisfying a predefined user request rate. Thirdly, two optimization problems are proposed to minimize the content delivery time for the two caching strategies. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the two caching methods.Comment: to appear in IEEE Trans. Wireless Commu

A survey on hybrid beamforming techniques in 5G : architecture and system model perspectives

The increasing wireless data traffic demands have driven the need to explore suitable spectrum regions for meeting the projected requirements. In the light of this, millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has received considerable attention from the research community. Typically, in fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications is realized by the hybrid transceivers which combine high dimensional analog phase shifters and power amplifiers with lower-dimensional digital signal processing units. This hybrid beamforming design reduces the cost and power consumption which is aligned with an energy-efficient design vision of 5G. In this paper, we track the progress in hybrid beamforming for massive MIMO communications in the context of system models of the hybrid transceivers' structures, the digital and analog beamforming matrices with the possible antenna configuration scenarios and the hybrid beamforming in heterogeneous wireless networks. We extend the scope of the discussion by including resource management issues in hybrid beamforming. We explore the suitability of hybrid beamforming methods, both, existing and proposed till first quarter of 2017, and identify the exciting future challenges in this domain

Multiuser Millimeter Wave Beamforming Strategies with Quantized and Statistical CSIT

To alleviate the high cost of hardware in mmWave systems, hybrid analog/digital precoding is typically employed. In the conventional two-stage feedback scheme, the analog beamformer is determined by beam search and feedback to maximize the desired signal power of each user. The digital precoder is designed based on quantization and feedback of effective channel to mitigate multiuser interference. Alternatively, we propose a one-stage feedback scheme which effectively reduces the complexity of the signalling and feedback procedure. Specifically, the second-order channel statistics are leveraged to design digital precoder for interference mitigation while all feedback overhead is reserved for precise analog beamforming. Under a fixed total feedback constraint, we investigate the conditions under which the one-stage feedback scheme outperforms the conventional two-stage counterpart. Moreover, a rate splitting (RS) transmission strategy is introduced to further tackle the multiuser interference and enhance the rate performance. Consider (1) RS precoded by the one-stage feedback scheme and (2) conventional transmission strategy precoded by the two-stage scheme with the same first-stage feedback as (1) and also certain amount of extra second-stage feedback. We show that (1) can achieve a sum rate comparable to that of (2). Hence, RS enables remarkable saving in the second-stage training and feedback overhead.Comment: submitted to TW