Impact of Residual Transmit RF Impairments on Training-Based MIMO Systems

Radio-frequency (RF) impairments, that exist intimately in wireless communications systems, can severely degrade the performance of traditional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Although compensation schemes can cancel out part of these RF impairments, there still remains a certain amount of impairments. These residual impairments have fundamental impact on the MIMO system performance. However, most of the previous works have neglected this factor. In this paper, a training-based MIMO system with residual transmit RF impairments (RTRI) is considered. In particular, we derive a new channel estimator for the proposed model, and find that RTRI can create an irreducible estimation error floor. Moreover, we show that, in the presence of RTRI, the optimal training sequence length can be larger than the number of transmit antennas, especially in the low and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. An increase in the proposed approximated achievable rate is also observed by adopting the optimal training sequence length. When the training and data symbol powers are required to be equal, we demonstrate that, at high SNRs, systems with RTRI demand more training, whereas at low SNRs, such demands are nearly the same for all practical levels of RTRI.Comment: Accepted for publication at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2014), 6 pages, 5 figure

MIMO Transmission with Residual Transmit-RF Impairments

Physical transceiver implementations for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems suffer from transmit-RF (Tx-RF) impairments. In this paper, we study the effect on channel capacity and error-rate performance of residual Tx-RF impairments that defy proper compensation. In particular, we demonstrate that such residual distortions severely degrade the performance of (near-)optimum MIMO detection algorithms. To mitigate this performance loss, we propose an efficient algorithm, which is based on an i.i.d. Gaussian model for the distortion caused by these impairments. In order to validate this model, we provide measurement results based on a 4-stream Tx-RF chain implementation for MIMO orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM).Comment: to be presented at the International ITG Workshop on Smart Antennas - WSA 201

Towards a Realistic Assessment of Multiple Antenna HCNs: Residual Additive Transceiver Hardware Impairments and Channel Aging

Given the critical dependence of broadcast channels by the accuracy of channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), we develop a general downlink model with zero-forcing (ZF) precoding, applied in realistic heterogeneous cellular systems with multiple antenna base stations (BSs). Specifically, we take into consideration imperfect CSIT due to pilot contamination, channel aging due to users relative movement, and unavoidable residual additive transceiver hardware impairments (RATHIs). Assuming that the BSs are Poisson distributed, the main contributions focus on the derivations of the upper bound of the coverage probability and the achievable user rate for this general model. We show that both the coverage probability and the user rate are dependent on the imperfect CSIT and RATHIs. More concretely, we quantify the resultant performance loss of the network due to these effects. We depict that the uplink RATHIs have equal impact, but the downlink transmit BS distortion has a greater impact than the receive hardware impairment of the user. Thus, the transmit BS hardware should be of better quality than user's receive hardware. Furthermore, we characterise both the coverage probability and user rate in terms of the time variation of the channel. It is shown that both of them decrease with increasing user mobility, but after a specific value of the normalised Doppler shift, they increase again. Actually, the time variation, following the Jakes autocorrelation function, mirrors this effect on coverage probability and user rate. Finally, we consider space division multiple access (SDMA), single user beamforming (SU-BF), and baseline single-input single-output (SISO) transmission. A comparison among these schemes reveals that the coverage by means of SU-BF outperforms SDMA in terms of coverage.Comment: accepted in IEEE TV

All-Digital Self-interference Cancellation Technique for Full-duplex Systems

Full-duplex systems are expected to double the spectral efficiency compared to conventional half-duplex systems if the self-interference signal can be significantly mitigated. Digital cancellation is one of the lowest complexity self-interference cancellation techniques in full-duplex systems. However, its mitigation capability is very limited, mainly due to transmitter and receiver circuit's impairments. In this paper, we propose a novel digital self-interference cancellation technique for full-duplex systems. The proposed technique is shown to significantly mitigate the self-interference signal as well as the associated transmitter and receiver impairments. In the proposed technique, an auxiliary receiver chain is used to obtain a digital-domain copy of the transmitted Radio Frequency (RF) self-interference signal. The self-interference copy is then used in the digital-domain to cancel out both the self-interference signal and the associated impairments. Furthermore, to alleviate the receiver phase noise effect, a common oscillator is shared between the auxiliary and ordinary receiver chains. A thorough analytical and numerical analysis for the effect of the transmitter and receiver impairments on the cancellation capability of the proposed technique is presented. Finally, the overall performance is numerically investigated showing that using the proposed technique, the self-interference signal could be mitigated to ~3dB higher than the receiver noise floor, which results in up to 76% rate improvement compared to conventional half-duplex systems at 20dBm transmit power values.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Simultaneous Transmission and Reception: Algorithm, Design and System Level Performance

Full Duplex or Simultaneous transmission and reception (STR) in the same frequency at the same time can potentially double the physical layer capacity. However, high power transmit signal will appear at receive chain as echoes with powers much higher than the desired received signal. Therefore, in order to achieve the potential gain, it is imperative to cancel these echoes. As these high power echoes can saturate low noise amplifier (LNA) and also digital domain echo cancellation requires unrealistically high resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC), the echoes should be cancelled or suppressed sufficiently before LNA. In this paper we present a closed-loop echo cancellation technique which can be implemented purely in analogue domain. The advantages of our method are multiple-fold: it is robust to phase noise, does not require additional set of antennas, can be applied to wideband signals and the performance is irrelevant to radio frequency (RF) impairments in transmit chain. Next, we study a few protocols for STR systems in carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) network and investigate MAC level throughput with realistic assumptions in both single cell and multiple cells. We show that STR can reduce hidden node problem in CSMA network and produce gains of up to 279% in maximum throughput in such networks. Finally, we investigate the application of STR in cellular systems and study two new unique interferences introduced to the system due to STR, namely BS-BS interference and UE-UE interference. We show that these two new interferences will hugely degrade system performance if not treated appropriately. We propose novel methods to reduce both interferences and investigate the performances in system level.Comment: 20 pages. This manuscript will appear in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Massive MIMO Systems with Non-Ideal Hardware: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits

The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases, thus strong signal gains are achievable with little inter-user interference. Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE. Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and inter-user interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and energy-efficient antenna elements.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28 pages, 15 figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/massive-MIMO-hardware-impairment