Experimental Evaluation of Blind Interference Alignment

The proceeding at: 2015 Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring) took place 11-14 May in Glasgow, Ireland.An experimental evaluation of Blind Interference Alignment (BIA) over a hardware platform is presented in this work. In contrast to other transmission techniques such as Linear Zero Forcing Beamforming (LZFB) or Interference Alignment (IA), BIA achieves a growth in Degrees of Freedom (DoF) without channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). A real implementation based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and LTE parameters is implement on a testbed made up of a transmitter equipped with two antennas and two users equipped with a reconfigurable antenna each. Furthermore, a full CSIT technique such as LZFB is also implemented for comparison purposes. First, the theoretic achievable rates are obtained for both techniques. After that, the bit error rate of both schemes is evaluated regarding the achieved sum-thorughput.This work has been partially funded by research projects COMONSENS (CSD2008-00010), and GRE3N (TEC2011-29006-C03-02)

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

Interference alignment testbeds

Interference alignment has triggered high impact research in wireless communications since it was proposed nearly 10 years ago. However, the vast majority of research is centered on the theory of interference alignment and is hardly feasible in view of the existing state-of-the-art wireless technologies. Although several research groups have assessed the feasibility of interference alignment via testbed measurements in realistic environments, the experimental evaluation of interference alignment is still in its infancy since most of the experiments were limited to simpler scenarios and configurations. This article summarizes the practical limitations of experimentally evaluating interference alignment, provides an overview of the available interference alignment testbed implementations, including the costs, and highlights the imperatives for succeeding interference alignment testbed implementations. Finally, the article explores future research directions on the applications of interference alignment in the next generation wireless systems.Jacobo Fanjul's research has been supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) of Spain, under grants TEC2013-47141-C4-R (RACHEL project) and FPI grant BES-2014-069786. José A. García-Naya's research has been funded by the Xunta de Galicia (ED431C 2016–045, ED341D R2016/012, E0431 G/01), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of Spain (TEC2013-47141-C4-1-R, TEC2015-69648-REOC, TEC2016-75067-C4-1-R), and ERDF funds of the EU (AEI/FEDER, UE). Hamed Farhadi's research has been funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) under grant 2015–00500

Blind interference alignment for cellular networks

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorManaging the interference is the main challenge in cellular networks. Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) schemes have emerged as a means of achieving high-capacity in wireless communications. The most efficient MIMO techniques are based on managing the interference instead of avoiding it by employing orthogonal resource allocation schemes. These transmission schemes require the knowledge of the Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT) to achieve the optimal Degrees of Freedom (DoF), also known as multiplexing gain. Providing an accurate CSIT in cellular environments involves high-capacity backhaul links and accurate synchronization, which imply the use of a large amount of network resources. Recently, a Blind Interference Alignment (BIA) scheme was devised as a means of achieving a growth in DoF regarding the amount of users served without the need for CSIT in the Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC). It is demonstrated that BIA achieves the optimal DoF in the BC without CSIT. However, the implementation of BIA in cellular networks is not straightforward. This dissertation investigates the DoF and the corresponding sum-rate of cellular networks in absence of CSIT and their achievability by using BIA schemes. First, this dissertation derives the DoF-region of homogenous cellular networks with partial connectivity. Assuming that all the Base Stations (BSs) cooperate in order to transmit to all users in the network, we proposed an extension of the BIA scheme for the MISO BC where the set of BSs transmits as in a network MIMO. It is shown that the cooperation between BSs results futile because of the lack of full connectivity in cellular networks. After that, this dissertation presents several transmission schemes based on the network topology. By differentiating between users that can treat this interference optimally as noise and those who need to manage the interference from neighbouring BSs, a network BIA scheme is devised to achieve the optimal DoF in homogeneous cellular networks. Second, the use of BIA schemes is analyzed for heterogeneous cellular networks. It is demonstrated that the previous BIA schemes based on the network topology result nonoptimal in DoF because of the particular features of the heterogenous cellular networks. More specifically, assuming a macro-femto network, cooperation between both tiers leads to a penalty for macro users while femto users do not exploit the particular topology of this kind of network. In this dissertation, the optimal linear DoF (lDoF) in a two-tier network are derived subject to optimality in DoF for the upper tier. It is demonstrated that, without CSIT or any cooperation between tiers, the lower tier can achieve nonzero DoF while the upper tier attains the optimal DoF by transmitting independently of the lower tier deployment. After that, a cognitive BIA scheme that achieves this outer bound is devised for macro-femto cellular networks. The third part of this dissertation is focused on the implementation of BIA in practical scenarios. It is shown that transmission at limited SNR and coherence time are the main hurdles to overcome for practical implementations of BIA. With aim of managing both constraints, the use of BIA together with orthogonal approaches is proposed in this work. An improvement on the inherent noise increase of BIA and the required coherence time is achieved at expenses of losing DoF. Therefore, there exists a trade-off between multiplexing gain, sum-rate at finite SNR and coherence time in practical scenarios. The optimal resource allocation for orthogonal transmission is obtained after solving a very specific optimization problem. To complete the characterization of the performance of BIA in realistic scenarios a experimental evaluation based on a hardware implementation is presented at the end of this work. It is shown that BIA outperforms the sum-rate of schemes based on CSIT such as LZFB because of the hardware impairments and the costs of providing CSIT in a realist implementation.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Multimedia y ComunicacionesPresidente: Luc Vandendorpe.- Secretario: María Julia Fernández-Getino García.- Vocal: Ignacio Santamaría Caballer

Hardware Evaluation of Interference Alignment Algorithms Using USRPs for Beyond 5G Networks

Proceedings of the 20th IEEE Region 8 EUROCON Conference, EUROCON 2023, 6-8 July 2023, Turín, ItalyNetwork densification is a key technology to achieve the spectral efficiency (SE) expected in 5G wireless networks and beyond. However, the proximity between transmitters and receivers increases the interference levels, becoming a major drawback. To overcome this problem, several interference management techniques have been proposed to increase the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Interference alignment (IA) algorithms have been extensively studied due to their capability to achieve optimal degrees of freedom (DoFs) in interference channels (ICs). Nevertheless, most of the works are limited to a purely theoretical analysis based on non-realistic assumptions such as perfect channel state information (CSI) and the synchronization of all nodes in the network. To the best of our knowledge, only a few articles address the IA implementation using reconfigurable hardware. To cover this lack, this paper proposes a practical design of the IA algorithm based on the SINR maximization, known as MAX-SINR, considering a multi-user IC. Each transmitter and receiver is implemented on the National Instruments USRP-2942. A practical solution for the channel estimation and synchronization stages in an IC, that are usually omitted in theoretical works, is developed. The performance of the proposed implementation is shown in terms of the SINR gain, SE, and bit error rate (BER). Unlike previous works, all the results are based on real measurements providing valuable insights into the performance of IA algorithms.This work has received funding from the European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie ETN TeamUp5G, grant agreement No. 813391. Also, this work has been partially funded by the Spanish National project IRENE-EARTH (PID2020- 115323RB-C33 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033

Establishing Multi-User MIMO Communications Automatically Using Retrodirective Arrays

Communications in the mmWave and THz bands will be a key technological pillar for next-generation wireless networks. However, the increase in frequency results in an increase in path loss, which must be compensated for by using large antenna arrays. This introduces challenging issues due to power consumption, signalling overhead for channel estimation, hardware complexity, and slow beamforming and beam alignment schemes, which are in contrast with the requirements of next-generation wireless networks. In this paper, we propose the adoption of a retro-directive antenna array (RAA) at the user equipment (UE) side, where the signal sent by the base station (BS) is reflected towards the source after being conjugated and phase-modulated according to the UE data. By making use of modified Power Methods for the computation of the eigenvectors of the resulting round-trip channel, it is shown that, in single and multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scenarios, ultra-low complexity UEs can establish parallel communication links automatically with the BS in a very short time. This is done in a blind way, also by tracking fast channel variations while communicating, without the need for ADC chains at the UE as well as without explicit channel estimation and time-consuming beamforming and beam alignment schemes

WideSee: towards wide-area contactless wireless sensing

Contactless wireless sensing without attaching a device to the target has achieved promising progress in recent years. However, one severe limitation is the small sensing range. This paper presents WideSee to realize wide-area sensing with only one transceiver pair. WideSee utilizes the LoRa signal to achieve a larger range of sensing and further incorporates drone's mobility to broaden the sensing area. WideSee presents solutions across software and hardware to overcome two aspects of challenges for wide-range contactless sensing: (i) the interference brought by the device mobility and LoRa's high sensitivity; and (ii) the ambiguous target information such as location when employing just a single pair of transceivers. We have developed a working prototype of WideSee for human target detection and localization that are especially useful in emergency scenarios such as rescue search, and evaluated WideSee with both controlled experiments and the field study in a high-rise building. Extensive experiments demonstrate the great potential of WideSee for wide-area contactless sensing with a single LoRa transceiver pair hosted on a drone