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

Joint Newton Iteration and Neumann Series Method of Convergence-Accelerating Matrix Inversion Approximation in Linear Precoding for Massive MIMO Systems

Due to large numbers of antennas and users, matrix inversion is complicated in linear precoding techniques for massive MIMO systems. Several approximated matrix inversion methods, including the Neumann series, have been proposed to reduce the complexity. However, the Neumann series does not converge fast enough. In this paper, to speed up convergence, a new joint Newton iteration and Neumann series method is proposed, with the first iteration result of Newton iteration method being employed to reconstruct the Neumann series. Then, a high probability convergence condition is established, which can offer useful guidelines for practical massive MIMO systems. Finally, simulation examples are given to demonstrate that the new joint Newton iteration and Neumann series method has a faster convergence rate compared to the previous Neumann series, with almost no increase in complexity when the iteration number is greater than or equal to 2