Downlink Energy Efficiency Analysis of Some Multiple Antenna Systems

In this paper we compare the energy efficiency of different multiple antenna transmission schemes for long-range wireless networks, assuming a realistic power consumption model. We consider the downlink, between a base station and a mobile station, in which the Alamouti scheme, transmit beamforming, receive diversity, spatial multiplexing, and transmit antenna selection are compared. Our analysis shows that, for different types of base stations, outage probability requirements and spectral efficiencies, the transmit antenna selection scheme is in general the most energy efficient option. Although antenna selection is not the best in terms of outage probability, it becomes the most efficient in terms of overall power consumption as it requires a single radio-frequency chain to obtain spatial diversity

On the energy efficiency-spectral efficiency trade-off of distributed MIMO systems

In this paper, the trade-off between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) is analyzed for both the uplink and downlink of the distributed multiple-input multiple-output (DMIMO) system over the Rayleigh fading channel while considering different types of power consumption models (PCMs). A novel tight closed-form approximation of the DMIMO EE-SE trade-off is presented and a detailed analysis is provided for the scenario with practical antenna configurations. Furthermore, generic and accurate low and high-SE approximations of this trade-off are derived for any number of radio access units (RAUs) in both the uplink and downlink channels. Our expressions have been utilized for assessing both the EE gain of DMIMO over co-located MIMO (CMIMO) and the incremental EE gain of DMIMO in the downlink channel. Our results reveal that DMIMO is more energy efficient than CMIMO for cell edge users in both the idealistic and realistic PCMs; whereas in terms of the incremental EE gain, connecting the user terminal to only one RAU is the most energy efficient approach when a realistic PCM is considered

Massive MIMO for Next Generation Wireless Systems

Multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) offers big advantages over conventional point-to-point MIMO: it works with cheap single-antenna terminals, a rich scattering environment is not required, and resource allocation is simplified because every active terminal utilizes all of the time-frequency bins. However, multi-user MIMO, as originally envisioned with roughly equal numbers of service-antennas and terminals and frequency division duplex operation, is not a scalable technology. Massive MIMO (also known as "Large-Scale Antenna Systems", "Very Large MIMO", "Hyper MIMO", "Full-Dimension MIMO" & "ARGOS") makes a clean break with current practice through the use of a large excess of service-antennas over active terminals and time division duplex operation. Extra antennas help by focusing energy into ever-smaller regions of space to bring huge improvements in throughput and radiated energy efficiency. Other benefits of massive MIMO include the extensive use of inexpensive low-power components, reduced latency, simplification of the media access control (MAC) layer, and robustness to intentional jamming. The anticipated throughput depend on the propagation environment providing asymptotically orthogonal channels to the terminals, but so far experiments have not disclosed any limitations in this regard. While massive MIMO renders many traditional research problems irrelevant, it uncovers entirely new problems that urgently need attention: the challenge of making many low-cost low-precision components that work effectively together, acquisition and synchronization for newly-joined terminals, the exploitation of extra degrees of freedom provided by the excess of service-antennas, reducing internal power consumption to achieve total energy efficiency reductions, and finding new deployment scenarios. This paper presents an overview of the massive MIMO concept and contemporary research.Comment: Final manuscript, to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin

Hardware Impairments in Large-scale MISO Systems: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits

The use of large-scale antenna arrays has the potential to bring substantial improvements in energy efficiency and/or spectral efficiency to future wireless systems, due to the greatly improved spatial beamforming resolution. Recent asymptotic results show that by increasing the number of antennas one can achieve a large array gain and at the same time naturally decorrelate the user channels; thus, the available energy can be focused very accurately at the intended destinations without causing much inter-user interference. Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether the conventional system models are still reasonable in the asymptotic regimes. This paper analyzes the fundamental limits of large-scale multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication systems using a generalized system model that accounts for transceiver hardware impairments. As opposed to the case of ideal hardware, we show that these practical impairments create finite ceilings on the estimation accuracy and capacity of large-scale MISO systems. Surprisingly, the performance is only limited by the hardware at the single-antenna user terminal, while the impact of impairments at the large-scale array vanishes asymptotically. Furthermore, we show that an arbitrarily high energy efficiency can be achieved by reducing the power while increasing the number of antennas.Comment: Published at International Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP 2013), 6 pages, 5 figure

A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication