Energy Efficient Large Scale Antenna Systems for 5G Communications and Beyond

The increasing popularity of mobile devices has fueled an exponential growth in data traffic. This phenomenon has led to the development of systems that achieve higher spectral efficiencies, at the cost of higher power consumptions. Consequently, the investigation on solutions that allow to increase the maximum throughput together with the energy efficiency becomes crucial for modern wireless systems. This thesis aims to improve the trade-off between performances and power consumption with special focus toward multiuser multiple-antenna communications, due to their promising benefits in terms of spectral efficiency. Research envisaged massive Multi-Input-Multi-Output (MIMO) systems as the main technology to meet these data traffic demands, as very large arrays lead to unprecedented data throughputs and beamforming gains. However, larger arrays lead to increased power consumption and hardware complexity, as each radiating element requires a radio frequency chain, which is accountable for the highest percentage of the total power consumption. Nonetheless, the availability of a large number of antennas unveils the possibility to wisely select a subset of radiating elements. This thesis shows that multiuser interference can be exploited to increase the received power, with significant circuit power savings at the base station. Similarly, millimeter-wave communications experienced raising interest among the scientific community because of their multi-GHz bandwidth and their ability to place large arrays in limited physical spaces. Millimeter-wave systems inherit same benefits and weaknesses of massive MIMO communications. However, antenna selection is not viable in millimeter-wave communications because they rely on high beamforming gains. Therefore, this thesis proposes a scheme that is able to reduce the number of radio frequency chains required, while achieving close-to-optimal performances. Analytical and numerical results show that the proposed techniques are able to improve the overall energy efficiency with respect to the state-of-the-art, hence proving to be valid candidates for practical implementations of modern communication systems