A New SLNR-based Linear Precoding for Downlink Multi-User Multi-Stream MIMO Systems

Signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (SLNR) is a promising criterion for linear precoder design in multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. It decouples the precoder design problem and makes closed-form solution available. In this letter, we present a new linear precoding scheme by slightly relaxing the SLNR maximization for MU-MIMO systems with multiple data streams per user. The precoding matrices are obtained by a general form of simultaneous diagonalization of two Hermitian matrices. The new scheme reduces the gap between the per-stream effective channel gains, an inherent limitation in the original SLNR precoding scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed precoding achieves considerable gains in error performance over the original one for multi-stream transmission while maintaining almost the same achievable sum-rate.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

Large System Analysis of Power Normalization Techniques in Massive MIMO

Linear precoding has been widely studied in the context of Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) together with two common power normalization techniques, namely, matrix normalization (MN) and vector normalization (VN). Despite this, their effect on the performance of Massive MIMO systems has not been thoroughly studied yet. The aim of this paper is to fulfill this gap by using large system analysis. Considering a system model that accounts for channel estimation, pilot contamination, arbitrary pathloss, and per-user channel correlation, we compute tight approximations for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and the rate of each user equipment in the system while employing maximum ratio transmission (MRT), zero forcing (ZF), and regularized ZF precoding under both MN and VN techniques. Such approximations are used to analytically reveal how the choice of power normalization affects the performance of MRT and ZF under uncorrelated fading channels. It turns out that ZF with VN resembles a sum rate maximizer while it provides a notion of fairness under MN. Numerical results are used to validate the accuracy of the asymptotic analysis and to show that in Massive MIMO, non-coherent interference and noise, rather than pilot contamination, are often the major limiting factors of the considered precoding schemes.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

On Robustness of Massive MIMO Systems Against Passive Eavesdropping under Antenna Selection

In massive MIMO wiretap settings, the base station can significantly suppress eavesdroppers by narrow beamforming toward legitimate terminals. Numerical investigations show that by this approach, secrecy is obtained at no significant cost. We call this property of massive MIMO systems `secrecy for free' and show that it not only holds when all the transmit antennas at the base station are employed, but also when only a single antenna is set active. Using linear precoding, the information leakage to the eavesdroppers can be sufficiently diminished, when the total number of available transmit antennas at the base station grows large, even when only a fixed number of them are selected. This result indicates that passive eavesdropping has no significant impact on massive MIMO systems, regardless of the number of active transmit antennas.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; To be presented in IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom) 2018 in Abu Dhabi, UA

Achievable Rates of Multi-User Millimeter Wave Systems with Hybrid Precoding

Millimeter wave (mmWave) systems will likely employ large antenna arrays at both the transmitters and receivers. A natural application of antenna arrays is simultaneous transmission to multiple users, which requires multi-user precoding at the transmitter. Hardware constraints, however, make it difficult to apply conventional lower frequency MIMO precoding techniques at mmWave. This paper proposes and analyzes a low complexity hybrid analog/digital beamforming algorithm for downlink multi-user mmWave systems. Hybrid precoding involves a combination of analog and digital processing that is motivated by the requirement to reduce the power consumption of the complete radio frequency and mixed signal hardware. The proposed algorithm configures hybrid precoders at the transmitter and analog combiners at multiple receivers with a small training and feedback overhead. For this algorithm, we derive a lower bound on the achievable rate for the case of single-path channels, show its asymptotic optimality at large numbers of antennas, and make useful insights for more general cases. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers higher sum rates compared with analog-only beamforming, and approaches the performance of the unconstrained digital precoding solutions.Comment: to be presented in IEEE ICC 2015 - Workshop on 5G & Beyond - Enabling Technologies and Application