3,970 research outputs found
Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays
Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or
"promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality.
Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially
deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it
into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve
unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due
to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital
Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively
complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with
fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and
mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the
Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun.
The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the
door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are
omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used
for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or
ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such
as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related
research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO,
Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive
MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital 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
On the Performance Gain of NOMA over OMA in Uplink Communication Systems
In this paper, we investigate and reveal the ergodic sum-rate gain (ESG) of
non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in
uplink cellular communication systems. A base station equipped with a
single-antenna, with multiple antennas, and with massive antenna arrays is
considered both in single-cell and multi-cell deployments. In particular, in
single-antenna systems, we identify two types of gains brought about by NOMA:
1) a large-scale near-far gain arising from the distance discrepancy between
the base station and users; 2) a small-scale fading gain originating from the
multipath channel fading. Furthermore, we reveal that the large-scale near-far
gain increases with the normalized cell size, while the small-scale fading gain
is a constant, given by = 0.57721 nat/s/Hz, in Rayleigh fading
channels. When extending single-antenna NOMA to -antenna NOMA, we prove that
both the large-scale near-far gain and small-scale fading gain achieved by
single-antenna NOMA can be increased by a factor of for a large number of
users. Moreover, given a massive antenna array at the base station and
considering a fixed ratio between the number of antennas, , and the number
of users, , the ESG of NOMA over OMA increases linearly with both and
. We then further extend the analysis to a multi-cell scenario. Compared to
the single-cell case, the ESG in multi-cell systems degrades as NOMA faces more
severe inter-cell interference due to the non-orthogonal transmissions.
Besides, we unveil that a large cell size is always beneficial to the ergodic
sum-rate performance of NOMA in both single-cell and multi-cell systems.
Numerical results verify the accuracy of the analytical results derived and
confirm the insights revealed about the ESG of NOMA over OMA in different
scenarios.Comment: 51 pages, 7 figures, invited paper, submitted to IEEE Transactions on
Communication
Pilot Decontamination in CMT-based Massive MIMO Networks
Pilot contamination problem in massive MIMO networks operating in
time-division duplex (TDD) mode can limit their expected capacity to a great
extent. This paper addresses this problem in cosine modulated multitone (CMT)
based massive MIMO networks; taking advantage of their so-called blind
equalization property. We extend and apply the blind equalization technique
from single antenna case to multi-cellular massive MIMO systems and show that
it can remove the channel estimation errors (due to pilot contamination effect)
without any need for cooperation between different cells or transmission of
additional training information. Our numerical results advocate the efficacy of
the proposed blind technique in improving the channel estimation accuracy and
removal of the residual channel estimation errors caused by the users of the
other cells.Comment: Accepted in ISWCS 201
Dealing with Interference in Distributed Large-scale MIMO Systems: A Statistical Approach
This paper considers the problem of interference control through the use of
second-order statistics in massive MIMO multi-cell networks. We consider both
the cases of co-located massive arrays and large-scale distributed antenna
settings. We are interested in characterizing the low-rankness of users'
channel covariance matrices, as such a property can be exploited towards
improved channel estimation (so-called pilot decontamination) as well as
interference rejection via spatial filtering. In previous work, it was shown
that massive MIMO channel covariance matrices exhibit a useful finite rank
property that can be modeled via the angular spread of multipath at a MIMO
uniform linear array. This paper extends this result to more general settings
including certain non-uniform arrays, and more surprisingly, to two dimensional
distributed large scale arrays. In particular our model exhibits the dependence
of the signal subspace's richness on the scattering radius around the user
terminal, through a closed form expression. The applications of the
low-rankness covariance property to channel estimation's denoising and
low-complexity interference filtering are highlighted.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, to appear in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in
Signal Processin
Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity
Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging
5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting
the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for
achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial
multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of
applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has
been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support
high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-of-Things (IoT)
is still a developing topic, as IoT connectivity has requirements and
constraints that are significantly different from the broadband connections. In
this paper we investigate the applicability of massive MIMO to IoT
connectivity. Specifically, we treat the two generic types of IoT connections
envisioned in 5G: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable
low-latency communication (URLLC). This paper fills this important gap by
identifying the opportunities and challenges in exploiting massive MIMO for IoT
connectivity. We provide insights into the trade-offs that emerge when massive
MIMO is applied to mMTC or URLLC and present a number of suitable communication
schemes. The discussion continues to the questions of network slicing of the
wireless resources and the use of massive MIMO to simultaneously support IoT
connections with very heterogeneous requirements. The main conclusion is that
massive MIMO can bring benefits to the scenarios with IoT connectivity, but it
requires tight integration of the physical-layer techniques with the protocol
design.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
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