Power Control in Massive MIMO with Dynamic User Population

This paper considers the problem of power control in Massive MIMO systems taking into account the pilot contamination issue and the arrivals and departures of users in the network. Contrary to most of existing work in MIMO systems that focuses on the physical layer with fixed number of users, we consider in this work that the users arrive dynamically and leave the network once they are served. We provide a power control strategy, having a polynomial complexity, and prove that this policy stabilizes the network whenever possible. We then provide a distributed implementation of the power control policy requiring low information exchange between the BSs and show that it achieves the same stability region as the centralized policy.Comment: conference paper, submitte

RIS-assisted Cell-Free MIMO with Dynamic Arrivals and Departures of Users: A Novel Network Stability Approach

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have recently emerged as a hot research topic, being widely advocated as a candidate technology for next generation wireless communications. These surfaces passively alter the behavior of propagation environments enhancing the performance of wireless communication systems. In this paper, we study the use of RIS in cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) setting where distributed service antennas, called Access Points (APs), simultaneously serve the users in the network. While most existing works focus on the physical layer improvements RIS carry, less attention has been paid to the impact of dynamic arrivals and departures of the users. In such a case, ensuring the stability of the network is the main goal. For that, we propose an optimization framework of the phase shifts, for which we derived a low-complexity solution. We then provide a theoretical analysis of the network stability and show that our framework stabilizes the network whenever it is possible. We also prove that a low complexity solution of our framework stabilizes a guaranteed fraction (higher than 78.5%) of the stability region. We provide also numerical results that corroborate the theoretical claims

Fairness Scheduling in Dense User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks

We consider a user-centric scalable cell-free massive MIMO network with a total of $LM$ distributed remote radio unit antennas serving $K$ user equipments (UEs). Many works in the current literature assume $LM\gg K$, enabling high UE data rates but also leading to a system not operating at its maximum performance in terms of sum throughput. We provide a new perspective on cell-free massive MIMO networks, investigating rate allocation and the UE density regime in which the network makes use of its full capability. The UE density $K$ approximately equal to $\frac{LM}{2}$ is the range in which the system reaches the largest sum throughput. In addition, there is a significant fraction of UEs with relatively low throughput, when serving $K>\frac{LM}{2}$ UEs simultaneously. We propose to reduce the number of active UEs per time slot, such that the system does not operate at ``full load'', and impose throughput fairness among all users via a scheduler designed to maximize a suitably defined concave componentwise non-decreasing network utility function. Our numerical simulations show that we can tune the system such that a desired distribution of the UE throughput, depending on the utility function, is achieved

Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Frame Structure Design and Analysis for Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems

The millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies have attracted considerable attention for fifth generation (5G) cellular communication as they offer orders of magnitude greater bandwidth than current cellular systems. However, the medium access control (MAC) layer may need to be significantly redesigned to support the highly directional transmissions, ultra-low latencies and high peak rates expected in mmWave communication. To address these challenges, we present a novel mmWave MAC layer frame structure with a number of enhancements including flexible, highly granular transmission times, dynamic control signal locations, extended messaging and ability to efficiently multiplex directional control signals. Analytic formulae are derived for the utilization and control overhead as a function of control periodicity, number of users, traffic statistics, signal-to-noise ratio and antenna gains. Importantly, the analysis can incorporate various front-end MIMO capability assumptions -- a critical feature of mmWave. Under realistic system and traffic assumptions, the analysis reveals that the proposed flexible frame structure design offers significant benefits over designs with fixed frame structures similar to current 4G long-term evolution (LTE). It is also shown that fully digital beamforming architectures offer significantly lower overhead compared to analog and hybrid beamforming under equivalent power budgets.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions for Wireless Communication