Massive MIMO has Unlimited Capacity

The capacity of cellular networks can be improved by the unprecedented array gain and spatial multiplexing offered by Massive MIMO. Since its inception, the coherent interference caused by pilot contamination has been believed to create a finite capacity limit, as the number of antennas goes to infinity. In this paper, we prove that this is incorrect and an artifact from using simplistic channel models and suboptimal precoding/combining schemes. We show that with multicell MMSE precoding/combining and a tiny amount of spatial channel correlation or large-scale fading variations over the array, the capacity increases without bound as the number of antennas increases, even under pilot contamination. More precisely, the result holds when the channel covariance matrices of the contaminating users are asymptotically linearly independent, which is generally the case. If also the diagonals of the covariance matrices are linearly independent, it is sufficient to know these diagonals (and not the full covariance matrices) to achieve an unlimited asymptotic capacity.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 17 pages, 7 figure

Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity

Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging 5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-of-Things (IoT) is still a developing topic, as IoT connectivity has requirements and constraints that are significantly different from the broadband connections. In this paper we investigate the applicability of massive MIMO to IoT connectivity. Specifically, we treat the two generic types of IoT connections envisioned in 5G: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). This paper fills this important gap by identifying the opportunities and challenges in exploiting massive MIMO for IoT connectivity. We provide insights into the trade-offs that emerge when massive MIMO is applied to mMTC or URLLC and present a number of suitable communication schemes. The discussion continues to the questions of network slicing of the wireless resources and the use of massive MIMO to simultaneously support IoT connections with very heterogeneous requirements. The main conclusion is that massive MIMO can bring benefits to the scenarios with IoT connectivity, but it requires tight integration of the physical-layer techniques with the protocol design.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Low-Complexity Channel Estimation in Large-Scale MIMO using Polynomial Expansion

This paper considers pilot-based channel estimation in large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems, also known as "massive MIMO". Unlike previous works on this topic, which mainly considered the impact of inter-cell disturbance due to pilot reuse (so-called pilot contamination), we are concerned with the computational complexity. The conventional minimum mean square error (MMSE) and minimum variance unbiased (MVU) channel estimators rely on inverting covariance matrices, which has cubic complexity in the multiplication of number of antennas at each side. Since this is extremely expensive when there are hundreds of antennas, we propose to approximate the inversion by an L-order matrix polynomial. A set of low-complexity Bayesian channel estimators, coined Polynomial ExpAnsion CHannel (PEACH) estimators, are introduced. The coefficients of the polynomials are optimized to yield small mean square error (MSE). We show numerically that near-optimal performance is achieved with low polynomial orders. In practice, the order L can be selected to balance between complexity and MSE. Interestingly, pilot contamination is beneficial to the PEACH estimators in the sense that smaller L can be used to achieve near-optimal MSEs.Comment: Published at IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC 2013), 8-11 September 2013, 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl