Multiuser Parallel Transmission with 1-tap Time Domain Beamforming by Millimeter Wave Massive Antenna Arrays

This paper investigates the feasibility of multiuser parallel transmission by sub-array beamforming using millimeter wave bands in which the Line-of-Sight (LoS) dominant channel environment is expected. Focusing on high beamforming gain provided by the massive antenna array, each sub-array conducts first eigenmode transmission and thus one stream is allocated per user without null steering. This paper also proposes 1-tap time domain beamforming (TDBF) as the same weight is applied to all frequency components. It reduces computation complexity as well as suppressing the effect of additive noise on weight derivation. Computer simulation results show that increasing the subarray spacing stably improves signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR) performance and that the proposed 1-tap TDBF can match the performance of the frequency domain first eigenmode transmission as a rigorous solution

Hybrid Beamforming via the Kronecker Decomposition for the Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Despite its promising performance gain, the realization of mmWave massive MIMO still faces several practical challenges. In particular, implementing massive MIMO in the digital domain requires hundreds of RF chains matching the number of antennas. Furthermore, designing these components to operate at the mmWave frequencies is challenging and costly. These motivated the recent development of hybrid-beamforming where MIMO processing is divided for separate implementation in the analog and digital domains, called the analog and digital beamforming, respectively. Analog beamforming using a phase array introduces uni-modulus constraints on the beamforming coefficients, rendering the conventional MIMO techniques unsuitable and call for new designs. In this paper, we present a systematic design framework for hybrid beamforming for multi-cell multiuser massive MIMO systems over mmWave channels characterized by sparse propagation paths. The framework relies on the decomposition of analog beamforming vectors and path observation vectors into Kronecker products of factors being uni-modulus vectors. Exploiting properties of Kronecker mixed products, different factors of the analog beamformer are designed for either nulling interference paths or coherently combining data paths. Furthermore, a channel estimation scheme is designed for enabling the proposed hybrid beamforming. The scheme estimates the AoA of data and interference paths by analog beam scanning and data-path gains by analog beam steering. The performance of the channel estimation scheme is analyzed. In particular, the AoA spectrum resulting from beam scanning, which displays the magnitude distribution of paths over the AoA range, is derived in closed-form. It is shown that the inter-cell interference level diminishes inversely with the array size, the square root of pilot sequence length and the spatial separation between paths.Comment: Submitted to IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Millimeter Wave Communications for Future Mobile Networks, minor revisio

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

Dynamic Metasurface Antennas for Energy Efficient Massive MIMO Uplink Communications

Future wireless communications are largely inclined to deploy a massive number of antennas at the base stations (BS) by exploiting energy-efficient and environmentally friendly technologies. An emerging technology called dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) is promising to realize such massive antenna arrays with reduced physical size, hardware cost, and power consumption. This paper aims to optimize the energy efficiency (EE) performance of DMAs-assisted massive MIMO uplink communications. We propose an algorithmic framework for designing the transmit precoding of each multi-antenna user and the DMAs tuning strategy at the BS to maximize the EE performance, considering the availability of the instantaneous and statistical channel state information (CSI), respectively. Specifically, the proposed framework includes Dinkelbach's transform, alternating optimization, and deterministic equivalent methods. In addition, we obtain a closed-form solution to the optimal transmit signal directions for the statistical CSI case, which simplifies the corresponding transmission design. The numerical results show good convergence performance of our proposed algorithms as well as considerable EE performance gains of the DMAs-assisted massive MIMO uplink communications over the baseline schemes

Distributed Massive MIMO in Millimetre Wave Communication

This thesis considers a distributed massive MIMO (D-MaMIMO) system for millimetre wave (mmWave) communication for an outdoor coverage area, as the wavelength of mmWave makes it easier and the free space path loss necessitates the use of relatively large distributed antenna arrays. We assume that the line-of-sight (LoS) links are available between the access points (APs) and user equipment (UEs). We have examined different AP arrangements to serve a given square area using the beamforming (BF) for a single user case. Furthermore, the zero-forcing (ZF) pre-coding is applied at a central processing unit (CPU) on the downlink to separate multiple users. We focus on these multi-user scenarios with varying numbers of APs to demonstrate the extent to which closely spaced users can be separated by ZF processing. We examine the determinant of the effective composite channel matrix to demonstrate the conditions under which the ZF problem may become ill-conditioned. We then show that nearly perfect separation is attainable, even when the UEs are only a few metres apart. Subsequently, an eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) based ZF is proposed to improve the performance of multi-antenna UEs. It has been observed that 3DBF has limited scope in circumstances when users are distributed horizontally, near to the same height as the APs and it is advantageous to employ non-square AP antenna arrays to maximize azimuth separation, especially for multi-user environments. The throughput per UE indicates how many users could be served effectively using the aforementioned schemes and AP arrangements for these multi-user cases. We further explore the significant issue of multipath propagation characteristics for mmWave communication and propose the novel distinction between the effective and the environmental K-factor for Ricean channels. A closed-form approximation for the effective K-factor is derived and corroborated by comparison with numerical results

Novel transmission and beamforming strategies for multiuser MIMO with various CSIT types

In multiuser multi-antenna wireless systems, the transmission and beamforming strategies that achieve the sum rate capacity depend critically on the acquisition of perfect Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT). Accordingly, a high-rate low-latency feedback link between the receiver and the transmitter is required to keep the latter accurately and instantaneously informed about the CSI. In realistic wireless systems, however, only imperfect CSIT is achievable due to pilot contamination, estimation error, limited feedback and delay, etc. As an intermediate solution, this thesis investigates novel transmission strategies suitable for various imperfect CSIT scenarios and the associated beamforming techniques to optimise the rate performance. First, we consider a two-user Multiple-Input-Single-Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC) under statistical and delayed CSIT. We mainly focus on linear beamforming and power allocation designs for ergodic sum rate maximisation. The proposed designs enable higher sum rate than the conventional designs. Interestingly, we propose a novel transmission framework which makes better use of statistical and delayed CSIT and smoothly bridges between statistical CSIT-based strategies and delayed CSIT-based strategies. Second, we consider a multiuser massive MIMO system under partial and statistical CSIT. In order to tackle multiuser interference incurred by partial CSIT, a Rate-Splitting (RS) transmission strategy has been proposed recently. We generalise the idea of RS into the large-scale array. By further exploiting statistical CSIT, we propose a novel framework Hierarchical-Rate-Splitting that is particularly suited to massive MIMO systems. Third, we consider a multiuser Millimetre Wave (mmWave) system with hybrid analog/digital precoding under statistical and quantised CSIT. We leverage statistical CSIT to design digital precoder for interference mitigation while all feedback overhead is reserved for precise analog beamforming. For very limited feedback and/or very sparse channels, the proposed precoding scheme yields higher sum rate than the conventional precoding schemes under a fixed total feedback constraint. Moreover, a RS transmission strategy is introduced to further tackle the multiuser interference, enabling remarkable saving in feedback overhead compared with conventional transmission strategies. Finally, we investigate the downlink hybrid precoding for physical layer multicasting with a limited number of RF chains. We propose a low complexity algorithm to compute the analog precoder that achieves near-optimal max-min performance. Moreover, we derive a simple condition under which the hybrid precoding driven by a limited number of RF chains incurs no loss of optimality with respect to the fully digital precoding case.Open Acces