An Overview of Massive MIMO Technology Components in METIS

As the standardization of full-dimension MIMO systems in the Third Generation Partnership Project progresses, the research community has started to explore the potential of very large arrays as an enabler technology for meeting the requirements of fifth generation systems. Indeed, in its final deliverable, the European 5G project METIS identifies massive MIMO as a key 5G enabler and proposes specific technology components that will allow the cost-efficient deployment of cellular systems taking advantage of hundreds of antennas at cellular base stations. These technology components include handling the inherent pilot-data resource allocation trade-off in a near optimal fashion, a novel random access scheme supporting a large number of users, coded channel state information for sparse channels in frequency-division duplexing systems, managing user grouping and multi-user beamforming, and a decentralized coordinated transceiver design. The aggregate effect of these components enables massive MIMO to contribute to the METIS objectives of delivering very high data rates and managing dense populations

Interference Management in 5G Reverse TDD HetNets with Wireless Backhaul: A Large System Analysis

This work analyzes a heterogeneous network (HetNet), which comprises a macro base station (BS) equipped with a large number of antennas and an overlaid dense tier of small cell access points (SCAs) using a wireless backhaul for data traffic. The static and low mobility user equipment terminals (UEs) are associated with the SCAs while those with medium-to-high mobility are served by the macro BS. A reverse time division duplexing (TDD) protocol is used by the two tiers, which allows the BS to locally estimate both the intra-tier and inter-tier channels. This knowledge is then used at the BS either in the uplink (UL) or in the downlink (DL) to simultaneously serve the macro UEs (MUEs) and to provide the wireless backhaul to SCAs. A geographical separation of co-channel SCAs is proposed to limit the interference coming from the UL signals of MUEs. A concatenated linear precoding technique employing either zero-forcing (ZF) or regularized ZF is used at the BS to simultaneously serve MUEs and SCAs in DL while nulling interference toward those SCAs in UL. We evaluate and characterize the performance of the system through the power consumption of UL and DL transmissions under the assumption that target rates must be satisfied and imperfect channel state information is available for MUEs. The analysis is conducted in the asymptotic regime where the number of BS antennas and the network size (MUEs and SCAs) grow large with fixed ratios. Results from large system analysis are used to provide concise formulae for the asymptotic UL and DL transmit powers and precoding vectors under the above assumptions. Numerical results are used to validate the analysis in different settings and to make comparisons with alternative network architectures.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures. To appear IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. -- Special Issue on HetNet

Energy harvesting based two-way full-duplex relaying network over a Rician fading environment: performance analysis

Full-duplex transmission is a promising technique to enhance the capacity of communication systems. In this paper, we propose and investigate the system performance of an energy harvesting based two-way full-duplex relaying network over a Rician fading environment. Firstly, we analyse and demonstrate the analytical expressions of the achievable throughput, outage probability, optimal time switching factor, and symbol error ratio of the proposed system. In the second step, the effect of various parameters of the system on its performance is presented and investigated. In the final step, the analytical results are also demonstrated by Monte Carlo simulation. The numerical results proved that the analytical results and the simulation results agreed with each other.Web of Science68112311

Soft Pilot Reuse and Multi-Cell Block Diagonalization Precoding for Massive MIMO Systems

The users at cell edge of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system suffer from severe pilot contamination, which leads to poor quality of service (QoS). In order to enhance the QoS for these edge users, soft pilot reuse (SPR) combined with multi-cell block diagonalization (MBD) precoding are proposed. Specifically, the users are divided into two groups according to their large-scale fading coefficients, referred to as the center users, who only suffer from modest pilot contamination and the edge users, who suffer from severe pilot contamination. Based on this distinction, the SPR scheme is proposed for improving the QoS for the edge users, whereby a cell-center pilot group is reused for all cell-center users in all cells, while a cell-edge pilot group is applied for the edge users in the adjacent cells. By extending the classical block diagonalization precoding to a multi-cell scenario, the MBD precoding scheme projects the downlink transmit signal onto the null space of the subspace spanned by the inter-cell channels of the edge users in adjacent cells. Thus, the inter-cell interference contaminating the edge users' signals in the adjacent cells can be efficiently mitigated and hence the QoS of these edge users can be further enhanced. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that both the uplink and downlink rates of the edge users are significantly improved, albeit at the cost of the slightly decreased rate of center users.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 201

Performance Comparison of Dual Connectivity and Hard Handover for LTE-5G Tight Integration in mmWave Cellular Networks

MmWave communications are expected to play a major role in the Fifth generation of mobile networks. They offer a potential multi-gigabit throughput and an ultra-low radio latency, but at the same time suffer from high isotropic pathloss, and a coverage area much smaller than the one of LTE macrocells. In order to address these issues, highly directional beamforming and a very high-density deployment of mmWave base stations were proposed. This Thesis aims to improve the reliability and performance of the 5G network by studying its tight and seamless integration with the current LTE cellular network. In particular, the LTE base stations can provide a coverage layer for 5G mobile terminals, because they operate on microWave frequencies, which are less sensitive to blockage and have a lower pathloss. This document is a copy of the Master's Thesis carried out by Mr. Michele Polese under the supervision of Dr. Marco Mezzavilla and Prof. Michele Zorzi. It will propose an LTE-5G tight integration architecture, based on mobile terminals' dual connectivity to LTE and 5G radio access networks, and will evaluate which are the new network procedures that will be needed to support it. Moreover, this new architecture will be implemented in the ns-3 simulator, and a thorough simulation campaign will be conducted in order to evaluate its performance, with respect to the baseline of handover between LTE and 5G.Comment: Master's Thesis carried out by Mr. Michele Polese under the supervision of Dr. Marco Mezzavilla and Prof. Michele Zorz

Two-stage time-domain pilot contamination elimination in large-scale multiple-antenna aided and TDD based OFDM systems

Pilot contamination (PC) is a major impediment of large-scale multi-cell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Hence we propose an optimal pilot design for timedomain channel estimation, which is capable of completely eliminating PC. More specifically, a sophisticated combination of downlink training and ‘scheduled’ uplink training is designed with the aid of the optimal pilot set. Given the optimal pilot set, every user acquires its unique downlink time-domain channel state information (CSI) through downlink training. The estimated downlink CSIs are then embedded in the uplink training. As a result, PC can be completely eliminated, at the cost of a slight increase in training computational complexity. Our simulation results demonstrate the power of the proposed scheme. Most significantly, our scheme imposes a modest training overhead of (L + 3), training-phase durations corresponding to the number of OFDM symbols, where L is the number of cells, which is substantially lower than that imposed by some of the existing PC elimination schemes. Therefore, it imposes a less stringent requirement on the channel’s coherence time. Finally, our scheme does not need any information exchange between base stations

On Phase Noise Suppression in Full-Duplex Systems

Oscillator phase noise has been shown to be one of the main performance limiting factors in full-duplex systems. In this paper, we consider the problem of self-interference cancellation with phase noise suppression in full-duplex systems. The feasibility of performing phase noise suppression in full-duplex systems in terms of both complexity and achieved gain is analytically and experimentally investigated. First, the effect of phase noise on full-duplex systems and the possibility of performing phase noise suppression are studied. Two different phase noise suppression techniques with a detailed complexity analysis are then proposed. For each suppression technique, both free-running and phase locked loop based oscillators are considered. Due to the fact that full-duplex system performance highly depends on hardware impairments, experimental analysis is essential for reliable results. In this paper, the performance of the proposed techniques is experimentally investigated in a typical indoor environment. The experimental results are shown to confirm the results obtained from numerical simulations on two different experimental research platforms. At the end, the tradeoff between the required complexity and the gain achieved using phase noise suppression is discussed.Comment: Published in IEEE transactions on wireless communications on October-2014. Please refer to the IEEE version for the most updated documen

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