Massive MIMO systems for 5G: a systematic mapping study on antenna design challenges and channel estimation open issues

The next generation of mobile networks (5G) is expected to achieve high data rates, reduce latency, as well as improve the spectral and energy efficiency of wireless communication systems. Several technologies are being explored to be used in 5G systems. One of the main promising technologies that is seen to be the enabler of 5G is massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems. Numerous studies have indicated the utility of mMIMO in upcoming wireless networks. However, there are several challenges that needs to be unravelled. In this paper, the latest progress of research on challenges in mMIMO systems is tracked, in the context of mutual coupling, antenna selection, pilot contamination and feedback overhead. The results of a systematic mapping study performed on 63 selected primary studies, published between the year 2017 till the second quarter of 2020, are presented. The main objective of this secondary study is to identify the challenges regarding antenna design and channel estimation, give an overview on the state-of-the-art solutions proposed in the literature, and finally, discuss emerging open research issues that need to be considered before the implementation of mMIMO systems in 5G networks

Joint precoding and antenna selection in massive mimo systems

This thesis presents an overview of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and proposes new algorithms to jointly precode and select the antennas. Massive MIMO is a new technology, which is candidate for comprising the fifth-generation (5G) of mobile cellular systems. This technology employs a huge amount of antennas at the base station and can reach high data rates under favorable, or asymptotically favorable, propagation conditions, while using simple linear processing. However, massive MIMO systems have some drawbacks, such as the high cost related to the base stations. A way to deal with this issue is to employ antenna selection algorithms at the base stations. These algorithms reduce the number of active antennas, decreasing the deployment and maintenance costs related to the base stations. Moreover, this thesis also describes a class of nonlinear precoders that are rarely addressed in the literature; these techniques are able to generate precoded sparse signals in order to achieve joint precoding and antenna selection. This thesis proposes two precoders belonging to this class, where the number of selected antennas is controlled by a design parameter. Simulation results show that the proposed precoders reach a lower bit-error rate than the classical antenna selection algorithms. Furthermore, simulation results show that the proposed precoders present a linear relation between the aforementioned design parameter that controls the signals’ sparsity and the number of selected antennas. Such relation is invariant to the number of base station’s antennas and the number of terminals served by this base station.Esta dissertação apresenta uma visão geral sobre MIMO (do termo em inglês, multiple-input multiple-output) massivo e propõe novos algoritmos que permitem a pré-codificacão de sinais e a seleção de antenas de forma simultânea. MIMO massivo é uma nova tecnologia candidata para compor a quinta geração (5G) dos sistemas celulares. Essa tecnologia utiliza uma quantidade muito grande de antenas na estação-base e, sob condições de propagação favorável ou assintoticamente favorável, pode alcançar taxas de transmissão elevadas, ainda que utilizando um simples processamento linear. Entretanto, os sistemas MIMO massivo apresentam algumas desvantagens, como por exemplo, o alto custo de implementação das estações-bases. Uma maneira de lidar com esse problema é utilizar algoritmos de seleção de antenas na estação-base. Com esses algoritmos é possível reduzir o número de antenas ativas e consequentemente reduzir o custo nas estações-bases. Essa dissertação também apresenta uma classe pouco estudada de pré-codificadores não-lineares que buscam sinais pré-codificados esparsos para realizar a seleção de antenas conjuntamente com a pré-codificação. Além disso, este trabalho propõem dois novos pré-codificadores pertencentes a essa classe, para os quais o número de antenas selecionadas é controlado por um parâmetro de projeto. Resultados de simulações mostram que os pré-codificadores propostos conseguem uma BER (do termo em inglês, bit-error rate) menor que os algoritmos clássicos usados para selecionar antenas. Além disso, resultados de simulações mostram que os pré-codificadores propostos apresentam uma relação linear com o parâmetro de projeto que controla a quantidade de antenas selecionadas; tal relação independe do número de antenas na estação-base e do número de terminais servidos por essa estação

Enabling Efficient Communications Over Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Channels Using Hybrid Beamforming

The use of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) over millimeter wave (mmWave) channels is the new frontier for fulfilling the exigent requirements of next-generation wireless systems and solving the wireless network impending crunch. Massive MIMO systems and mmWave channels offer larger numbers of antennas, higher carrier frequencies, and wider signaling bandwidths. Unleashing the full potentials of these tremendous degrees of freedom (dimensions) hinges on the practical deployment of those technologies. Hybrid analog and digital beamforming is considered as a stepping-stone to the practical deployment of mmWave massive MIMO systems since it significantly reduces their operating and implementation costs, energy consumption, and system design complexity. The prevalence of adopting mmWave and massive MIMO technologies in next-generation wireless systems necessitates developing agile and cost-efficient hybrid beamforming solutions that match the various use-cases of these systems. In this thesis, we propose hybrid precoding and combining solutions that are tailored to the needs of these specific cases and account for the main limitations of hybrid processing. The proposed solutions leverage the sparsity and spatial correlation of mmWave massive MIMO channels to reduce the feedback overhead and computational complexity of hybrid processing. Real-time use-cases of next-generation wireless communication, including connected cars, virtual-reality/augmented-reality, and high definition video transmission, require high-capacity and low-latency wireless transmission. On the physical layer level, this entails adopting near capacity-achieving transmission schemes with very low computational delay. Motivated by this, we propose low-complexity hybrid precoding and combining schemes for massive MIMO systems with partially and fully-connected antenna array structures. Leveraging the disparity in the dimensionality of the analog and the digital processing matrices, we develop a two-stage channel diagonalization design approach in order to reduce the computational complexity of the hybrid precoding and combining while maintaining high spectral efficiency. Particularly, the analog processing stage is designed to maximize the antenna array gain in order to avoid performing computationally intensive operations such as matrix inversion and singular value decomposition in high dimensions. On the other hand, the low-dimensional digital processing stage is designed to maximize the spectral efficiency of the systems. Computational complexity analysis shows that the proposed schemes offer significant savings compared to prior works where asymptotic computational complexity reductions ranging between $80\%$ and $98\%$. Simulation results validate that the spectral efficiency of the proposed schemes is near-optimal where in certain scenarios the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) gap to the optimal fully-digital spectral efficiency is less than $1$ dB. On the other hand, integrating mmWave and massive MIMO into the cellular use-cases requires adopting hybrid beamforming schemes that utilize limited channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) in order to adapt the transmitted signals to the current channel. This is so mainly because obtaining perfect CSIT in frequency division duplexing (FDD) architecture, which dominates the cellular systems, poses serious concerns due to its large training and excessive feedback overhead. Motivated by this, we develop low-overhead hybrid precoding algorithms for selecting the baseband digital and radio frequency (RF) analog precoders from statistically skewed DFT-based codebooks. The proposed algorithms aim at maximizing the spectral efficiency based on minimizing the chordal distance between the optimal unconstrained precoder and the hybrid beamformer and maximizing the signal to interference noise ratio for the single-user and multi-user cases, respectively. Mathematical analysis shows that the proposed algorithms are asymptotically optimal as the number of transmit antennas goes to infinity and the mmWave channel has a limited number of paths. Moreover, it shows that the performance gap between the lower and upper bounds depends heavily on how many DFT columns are aligned to the largest eigenvectors of the transmit antenna array response of the mmWave channel or equivalently the transmit channel covariance matrix when only the statistical channel knowledge is available at the transmitter. Further, we verify the performance of the proposed algorithms numerically where the obtained results illustrate that the spectral efficiency of the proposed algorithms can approach that of the optimal precoder in certain scenarios. Furthermore, these results illustrate that the proposed hybrid precoding schemes have superior spectral efficiency performance while requiring lower (or at most comparable) channel feedback overhead in comparison with the prior art

Multi-Antenna Techniques for Next Generation Cellular Communications

Future cellular communications are expected to offer substantial improvements for the pre- existing mobile services with higher data rates and lower latency as well as pioneer new types of applications that must comply with strict demands from a wider range of user types. All of these tasks require utmost efficiency in the use of spectral resources. Deploying multiple antennas introduces an additional signal dimension to wireless data transmissions, which provides a significant alternative solution against the plateauing capacity issue of the limited available spectrum. Multi-antenna techniques and the associated key enabling technologies possess unquestionable potential to play a key role in the evolution of next generation cellular systems. Spectral efficiency can be improved on downlink by concurrently serving multiple users with high-rate data connections on shared resources. In this thesis optimized multi-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmissions are investigated on downlink from both filter design and resource allocation/assignment points of view. Regarding filter design, a joint baseband processing method is proposed specifically for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, where the necessary signaling overhead can be compensated for. Regarding resource scheduling, greedy- and genetic-based algorithms are proposed that demand lower complexity with large number of resource blocks relative to prior implementations. Channel estimation techniques are investigated for massive MIMO technology. In case of channel reciprocity, this thesis proposes an overhead reduction scheme for the signaling of user channel state information (CSI) feedback during a relative antenna calibration. In addition, a multi-cell coordination method is proposed for subspace-based blind estimators on uplink, which can be implicitly translated to downlink CSI in the presence of ideal reciprocity. Regarding non-reciprocal channels, a novel estimation technique is proposed based on reconstructing full downlink CSI from a select number of dominant propagation paths. The proposed method offers drastic compressions in user feedback reports and requires much simpler downlink training processes. Full-duplex technology can provide up to twice the spectral efficiency of conventional resource divisions. This thesis considers a full-duplex two-hop link with a MIMO relay and investigates mitigation techniques against the inherent loop-interference. Spatial-domain suppression schemes are developed for the optimization of full-duplex MIMO relaying in a coverage extension scenario on downlink. The proposed methods are demonstrated to generate data rates that closely approximate their global bounds

A survey on hybrid beamforming techniques in 5G : architecture and system model perspectives

The increasing wireless data traffic demands have driven the need to explore suitable spectrum regions for meeting the projected requirements. In the light of this, millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has received considerable attention from the research community. Typically, in fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications is realized by the hybrid transceivers which combine high dimensional analog phase shifters and power amplifiers with lower-dimensional digital signal processing units. This hybrid beamforming design reduces the cost and power consumption which is aligned with an energy-efficient design vision of 5G. In this paper, we track the progress in hybrid beamforming for massive MIMO communications in the context of system models of the hybrid transceivers' structures, the digital and analog beamforming matrices with the possible antenna configuration scenarios and the hybrid beamforming in heterogeneous wireless networks. We extend the scope of the discussion by including resource management issues in hybrid beamforming. We explore the suitability of hybrid beamforming methods, both, existing and proposed till first quarter of 2017, and identify the exciting future challenges in this domain