Downlink Training in Cell-Free Massive MIMO: A Blessing in Disguise

Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system where all the access points (APs) cooperate to coherently serve all the user equipments (UEs), suppress inter-cell interference and mitigate the multiuser interference. Recent works demonstrated that, unlike co-located Massive MIMO, the \textit{channel hardening} is, in general, less pronounced in cell-free Massive MIMO, thus there is much to benefit from estimating the downlink channel. In this study, we investigate the gain introduced by the downlink beamforming training, extending the previously proposed analysis to non-orthogonal uplink and downlink pilots. Assuming single-antenna APs, conjugate beamforming and independent Rayleigh fading channel, we derive a closed-form expression for the per-user achievable downlink rate that addresses channel estimation errors and pilot contamination both at the AP and UE side. The performance evaluation includes max-min fairness power control, greedy pilot assignment methods, and a comparison between achievable rates obtained from different capacity-bounding techniques. Numerical results show that downlink beamforming training, although increases pilot overhead and introduces additional pilot contamination, improves significantly the achievable downlink rate. Even for large number of APs, it is not fully efficient for the UE relying on the statistical channel state information for data decoding.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications on August 14, 2019. {\copyright} 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other use

Performance of Orthogonal Beamforming for SDMA with Limited Feedback

On the multi-antenna broadcast channel, the spatial degrees of freedom support simultaneous transmission to multiple users. The optimal multiuser transmission, known as dirty paper coding, is not directly realizable. Moreover, close-to-optimal solutions such as Tomlinson-Harashima precoding are sensitive to CSI inaccuracy. This paper considers a more practical design called per user unitary and rate control (PU2RC), which has been proposed for emerging cellular standards. PU2RC supports multiuser simultaneous transmission, enables limited feedback, and is capable of exploiting multiuser diversity. Its key feature is an orthogonal beamforming (or precoding) constraint, where each user selects a beamformer (or precoder) from a codebook of multiple orthonormal bases. In this paper, the asymptotic throughput scaling laws for PU2RC with a large user pool are derived for different regimes of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the multiuser-interference-limited regime, the throughput of PU2RC is shown to scale logarithmically with the number of users. In the normal SNR and noise-limited regimes, the throughput is found to scale double logarithmically with the number of users and also linearly with the number of antennas at the base station. In addition, numerical results show that PU2RC achieves higher throughput and is more robust against CSI quantization errors than the popular alternative of zero-forcing beamforming if the number of users is sufficiently large.Comment: 27 pages; to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Energy-efficiency for MISO-OFDMA based user-relay assisted cellular networks

The concept of improving energy-efficiency (EE) without sacrificing the service quality has become important nowadays. The combination of orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) multi-antenna transmission technology and relaying is one of the key technologies to deliver the promise of reliable and high-data-rate coverage in the most cost-effective manner. In this paper, EE is studied for the downlink multiple-input single-output (MISO)-OFDMA based user-relay assisted cellular networks. EE maximization is formulated for decode and forward (DF) relaying scheme with the consideration of both transmit and circuit power consumption as well as the data rate requirements for the mobile users. The quality of-service (QoS)-constrained EE maximization, which is defined for multi-carrier, multi-user, multi-relay and multi-antenna networks, is a non-convex and combinatorial problem so it is hard to tackle. To solve this difficult problem, a radio resource management (RRM) algorithm that solves the subcarrier allocation, mode selection and power allocation separately is proposed. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by numerical results for different system parameter

A High-Diversity Transceiver Design for MISO Broadcast Channels

In this paper, the outage behavior and diversity order of the mixture transceiver architecture for multiple-input single-output broadcast channels are analyzed. The mixture scheme groups users with closely-aligned channels and applies superposition coding and successive interference cancellation decoding to each group composed of users with closely-aligned channels, while applying zero-forcing beamforming across semi-orthogonal user groups. In order to enable such analysis, closed-form lower bounds on the achievable rates of a general multiple-input single-output broadcast channel with superposition coding and successive interference cancellation are newly derived. By employing channel-adaptive user grouping and proper power allocation, which ensures that the channel subspaces of user groups have angle larger than a certain threshold, it is shown that the mixture transceiver architecture achieves full diversity order in multiple-input single-output broadcast channels and opportunistically increases the multiplexing gain while achieving full diversity order. Furthermore, the achieved full diversity order is the same as that of the single-user maximum ratio transmit beamforming. Hence, the mixture scheme can provide reliable communication under channel fading for ultra-reliable low latency communication. Numerical results validate our analysis and show the outage superiority of the mixture scheme over conventional transceiver designs for multiple-input single-output broadcast channels.Comment: The inner region is evaluated. The single-group SIC performance is evaluate