2,184 research outputs found
Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays
Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or
"promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality.
Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially
deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it
into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve
unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due
to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital
Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively
complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with
fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and
mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the
Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun.
The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the
door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are
omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used
for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or
ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such
as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related
research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO,
Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive
MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin
On the Total Energy Efficiency of Cell-Free Massive MIMO
We consider the cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
downlink, where a very large number of distributed multiple-antenna access
points (APs) serve many single-antenna users in the same time-frequency
resource. A simple (distributed) conjugate beamforming scheme is applied at
each AP via the use of local channel state information (CSI). This CSI is
acquired through time-division duplex operation and the reception of uplink
training signals transmitted by the users. We derive a closed-form expression
for the spectral efficiency taking into account the effects of channel
estimation errors and power control. This closed-form result enables us to
analyze the effects of backhaul power consumption, the number of APs, and the
number of antennas per AP on the total energy efficiency, as well as, to design
an optimal power allocation algorithm. The optimal power allocation algorithm
aims at maximizing the total energy efficiency, subject to a per-user spectral
efficiency constraint and a per-AP power constraint. Compared with the equal
power control, our proposed power allocation scheme can double the total energy
efficiency. Furthermore, we propose AP selections schemes, in which each user
chooses a subset of APs, to reduce the power consumption caused by the backhaul
links. With our proposed AP selection schemes, the total energy efficiency
increases significantly, especially for large numbers of APs. Moreover, under a
requirement of good quality-of-service for all users, cell-free massive MIMO
outperforms the colocated counterpart in terms of energy efficiency
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
Ubiquitous Cell-Free Massive MIMO Communications
Since the first cellular networks were trialled in the 1970s, we have
witnessed an incredible wireless revolution. From 1G to 4G, the massive traffic
growth has been managed by a combination of wider bandwidths, refined radio
interfaces, and network densification, namely increasing the number of antennas
per site. Due its cost-efficiency, the latter has contributed the most. Massive
MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a key 5G technology that uses massive
antenna arrays to provide a very high beamforming gain and spatially
multiplexing of users, and hence, increases the spectral and energy efficiency.
It constitutes a centralized solution to densify a network, and its performance
is limited by the inter-cell interference inherent in its cell-centric design.
Conversely, ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO refers to a distributed Massive
MIMO system implementing coherent user-centric transmission to overcome the
inter-cell interference limitation in cellular networks and provide additional
macro-diversity. These features, combined with the system scalability inherent
in the Massive MIMO design, distinguishes ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO
from prior coordinated distributed wireless systems. In this article, we
investigate the enormous potential of this promising technology while
addressing practical deployment issues to deal with the increased
back/front-hauling overhead deriving from the signal co-processing.Comment: Published in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and
Networking on August 5, 201
Massive MIMO Systems with Non-Ideal Hardware: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits
The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in
energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly
improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of
massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels
decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases,
thus strong signal gains are achievable with little inter-user interference.
Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether
the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This
paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver
hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and
the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case
of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on
the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE.
Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while
the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and
inter-user interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes
negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by
massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger
hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and
energy-efficient antenna elements.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28 pages, 15
figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code:
https://github.com/emilbjornson/massive-MIMO-hardware-impairment
Downlink Spectral Efficiency of Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Full-Pilot Zero-Forcing
Cell-free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ensures ubiquitous
communication at high spectral efficiency (SE) thanks to increased
macro-diversity as compared cellular communications. However, system
scalability and performance are limited by fronthauling traffic and
interference. Unlike conventional precoding schemes that only suppress
intra-cell interference, full-pilot zero-forcing (fpZF), introduced in [1],
actively suppresses also inter-cell interference, without sharing channel state
information (CSI) among the access points (APs). In this study, we derive a new
closed-form expression for the downlink (DL) SE of a cell-free Massive MIMO
system with multi-antenna APs and fpZF precoding, under imperfect CSI and pilot
contamination. The analysis also includes max-min fairness DL power
optimization. Numerical results show that fpZF significantly outperforms
maximum ratio transmission scheme, without increasing the fronthauling
overhead, as long as the system is sufficiently distributed.Comment: Paper published in 2018 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and
Information Processing (GlobalSIP). {\copyright} 2019 IEEE. Personal use of
this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all
other use
- …