Implementable Wireless Access for B3G Networks - III: Complexity Reducing Transceiver Structures

This article presents a comprehensive overview of some of the research conducted within Mobile VCE’s Core Wireless Access Research Programme,1 a key focus of which has naturally been on MIMO transceivers. The series of articles offers a coherent view of how the work was structured and comprises a compilation of material that has been presented in detail elsewhere (see references within the article). In this article MIMO channel measurements, analysis, and modeling, which were presented previously in the first article in this series of four, are utilized to develop compact and distributed antenna arrays. Parallel activities led to research into low-complexity MIMO single-user spacetime coding techniques, as well as SISO and MIMO multi-user CDMA-based transceivers for B3G systems. As well as feeding into the industry’s in-house research program, significant extensions of this work are now in hand, within Mobile VCE’s own core activity, aiming toward securing major improvements in delivery efficiency in future wireless systems through crosslayer operation

Sum Throughput Maximization in Multi-Tag Backscattering to Multiantenna Reader

Backscatter communication (BSC) is being realized as the core technology for pervasive sustainable Internet-of-Things applications. However, owing to the resource-limitations of passive tags, the efficient usage of multiple antennas at the reader is essential for both downlink excitation and uplink detection. This work targets at maximizing the achievable sum-backscattered-throughput by jointly optimizing the transceiver (TRX) design at the reader and backscattering coefficients (BC) at the tags. Since, this joint problem is nonconvex, we first present individually-optimal designs for the TRX and BC. We show that with precoder and {combiner} designs at the reader respectively targeting downlink energy beamforming and uplink Wiener filtering operations, the BC optimization at tags can be reduced to a binary power control problem. Next, the asymptotically-optimal joint-TRX-BC designs are proposed for both low and high signal-to-noise-ratio regimes. Based on these developments, an iterative low-complexity algorithm is proposed to yield an efficient jointly-suboptimal design. Thereafter, we discuss the practical utility of the proposed designs to other application settings like wireless powered communication networks and BSC with imperfect channel state information. Lastly, selected numerical results, validating the analysis and shedding novel insights, demonstrate that the proposed designs can yield significant enhancement in the sum-backscattered throughput over existing benchmarks.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example, prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin

Approximate MIMO Iterative Processing with Adjustable Complexity Requirements

Targeting always the best achievable bit error rate (BER) performance in iterative receivers operating over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels may result in significant waste of resources, especially when the achievable BER is orders of magnitude better than the target performance (e.g., under good channel conditions and at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)). In contrast to the typical iterative schemes, a practical iterative decoding framework that approximates the soft-information exchange is proposed which allows reduced complexity sphere and channel decoding, adjustable to the transmission conditions and the required bit error rate. With the proposed approximate soft information exchange the performance of the exact soft information can still be reached with significant complexity gains.Comment: The final version of this paper appears in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Metameric MIMO-OOK transmission scheme using multiple RGB LEDs

In this work, we propose a novel visible light communication (VLC) scheme utilizing multiple di erent red green and blue triplets each with a di erent emission spectrum of red, green and blue for mitigating the e ect of interference due to di erent colors using spatial multiplexing. On-o keying modulation is considered and its e ect on light emission in terms of flickering, dimming and color rendering is discussed so as to demonstrate how metameric properties have been considered. At the receiver, multiple photodiodes with color filter-tuned on each transmit light emitting diode (LED) are employed. Three di erent detection mechanisms of color zero forcing, minimum mean square error estimation and minimum mean square error equalization are then proposed. The system performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated both with computer simulations and tests with an Arduino board implementatio