Circuit-Aware Design of Energy-Efficient Massive MIMO Systems

Densification is a key to greater throughput in cellular networks. The full potential of coordinated multipoint (CoMP) can be realized by massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where each base station (BS) has very many antennas. However, the improved throughput comes at the price of more infrastructure; hardware cost and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of antennas. In this paper, we show that one can make the circuit power increase with only the square root of the number of antennas by circuit-aware system design. To this end, we derive achievable user rates for a system model with hardware imperfections and show how the level of imperfections can be gradually increased while maintaining high throughput. The connection between this scaling law and the circuit power consumption is established for different circuits at the BS.Comment: Published at International Symposium on Communications, Control, and Signal Processing (ISCCSP 2014), 4 pages, 3 figures. This version corrects an error related to Lemma

Massive MIMO with Non-Ideal Arbitrary Arrays: Hardware Scaling Laws and Circuit-Aware Design

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are cellular networks where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with unconventionally many antennas, deployed on co-located or distributed arrays. Huge spatial degrees-of-freedom are achieved by coherent processing over these massive arrays, which provide strong signal gains, resilience to imperfect channel knowledge, and low interference. This comes at the price of more infrastructure; the hardware cost and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of BS antennas $N$. Hence, the key to cost-efficient deployment of large arrays is low-cost antenna branches with low circuit power, in contrast to today's conventional expensive and power-hungry BS antenna branches. Such low-cost transceivers are prone to hardware imperfections, but it has been conjectured that the huge degrees-of-freedom would bring robustness to such imperfections. We prove this claim for a generalized uplink system with multiplicative phase-drifts, additive distortion noise, and noise amplification. Specifically, we derive closed-form expressions for the user rates and a scaling law that shows how fast the hardware imperfections can increase with $N$ while maintaining high rates. The connection between this scaling law and the power consumption of different transceiver circuits is rigorously exemplified. This reveals that one can make the circuit power increase as $\sqrt{N}$, instead of linearly, by careful circuit-aware system design.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 16 pages, 8 figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/hardware-scaling-law

Energy Efficiency and Sum Rate when Massive MIMO meets Device-to-Device Communication

This paper considers a scenario of short-range communication, known as device-to-device (D2D) communication, where D2D users reuse the downlink resources of a cellular network to transmit directly to their corresponding receivers. In addition, multiple antennas at the base station (BS) are used in order to simultaneously support multiple cellular users using multiuser or massive MIMO. The network model considers a fixed number of cellular users and that D2D users are distributed according to a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP). Two metrics are studied, namely, average sum rate (ASR) and energy efficiency (EE). We derive tractable expressions and study the tradeoffs between the ASR and EE as functions of the number of BS antennas and density of D2D users for a given coverage area.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, to be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) Workshop on Device-to-Device Communication for Cellular and Wireless Networks, London, UK, June 201

Energy Efficiency and Sum Rate Tradeoffs for Massive MIMO Systems with Underlaid Device-to-Device Communications

In this paper, we investigate the coexistence of two technologies that have been put forward for the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks, namely, network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications and massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output). Potential benefits of both technologies are known individually, but the tradeoffs resulting from their coexistence have not been adequately addressed. To this end, we assume that D2D users reuse the downlink resources of cellular networks in an underlay fashion. In addition, multiple antennas at the BS are used in order to obtain precoding gains and simultaneously support multiple cellular users using multiuser or massive MIMO technique. Two metrics are considered, namely the average sum rate (ASR) and energy efficiency (EE). We derive tractable and directly computable expressions and study the tradeoffs between the ASR and EE as functions of the number of BS antennas, the number of cellular users and the density of D2D users within a given coverage area. Our results show that both the ASR and EE behave differently in scenarios with low and high density of D2D users, and that coexistence of underlay D2D communications and massive MIMO is mainly beneficial in low densities of D2D users.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, Submitte