192 research outputs found
Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions
Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use
of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active
terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and
addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great
capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in
energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals
from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The
complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle
to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on
system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient
implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon
technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the
bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example,
prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real
time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing
of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna
paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article
summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal
processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on
low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how
terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology
and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future
research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin
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
6G Radio Testbeds: Requirements, Trends, and Approaches
The proof of the pudding is in the eating - that is why 6G testbeds are
essential in the progress towards the next generation of wireless networks.
Theoretical research towards 6G wireless networks is proposing advanced
technologies to serve new applications and drastically improve the energy
performance of the network. Testbeds are indispensable to validate these new
technologies under more realistic conditions. This paper clarifies the
requirements for 6G radio testbeds, reveals trends, and introduces approaches
towards their development
On Channel Reciprocity to Activate Uplink Channel Training for Downlink Wireless Transmission in Tactile Internet Applications
We determine, for the first time, the requirement on channel reciprocity to
activate uplink channel training, instead of downlink channel training, to
achieve a higher data rate for the downlink transmission from a multi-antenna
base station to a single-antenna user. We first derive novel closed-form
expressions for the lower bounds on the data rates achieved by the two channel
training strategies by considering the impact of finite blocklength. The
performance comparison result of these two strategies is determined by the
amount of channel reciprocity that is utilized in the uplink channel training.
We then derive an approximated expression for the minimum channel reciprocity
that enables the uplink channel training to outperform the downlink channel
training. Through numerical results, we demonstrate that this minimum channel
reciprocity decreases as the blocklength decreases or the number of transmit
antennas increases, which shows the necessity and benefits of activating the
uplink channel training for short-packet communications with multiple transmit
antennas. This work provides pivotal and unprecedented guidelines on choosing
channel training strategies and channel reciprocity calibrations, offering
valuable insights into latency reduction in the Tactile Internet applications.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to IEEE ICC 2018 Worksho
Toward 6G TK Extreme Connectivity: Architecture, Key Technologies and Experiments
Sixth-generation (6G) networks are evolving towards new features and
order-of-magnitude enhancement of systematic performance metrics compared to
the current 5G. In particular, the 6G networks are expected to achieve extreme
connectivity performance with Tbps-scale data rate, Kbps/Hz-scale spectral
efficiency, and s-scale latency. To this end, an original three-layer 6G
network architecture is designed to realise uniform full-spectrum cell-free
radio access and provide task-centric agile proximate support for diverse
applications. The designed architecture is featured by super edge node (SEN)
which integrates connectivity, computing, AI, data, etc. On this basis, a
technological framework of pervasive multi-level (PML) AI is established in the
centralised unit to enable task-centric near-real-time resource allocation and
network automation. We then introduce a radio access network (RAN) architecture
of full spectrum uniform cell-free networks, which is among the most attractive
RAN candidates for 6G TK extreme connectivity. A few most promising key
technologies, i.e., cell-free massive MIMO, photonics-assisted Terahertz
wireless access and spatiotemporal two-dimensional channel coding are further
discussed. A testbed is implemented and extensive trials are conducted to
evaluate innovative technologies and methodologies. The proposed 6G network
architecture and technological framework demonstrate exciting potentials for
full-service and full-scenario applications.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure
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