4,271 research outputs found
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
Energy efficiency of mmWave massive MIMO precoding with low-resolution DACs
With the congestion of the sub-6 GHz spectrum, the interest in massive
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems operating on millimeter wave
spectrum grows. In order to reduce the power consumption of such massive MIMO
systems, hybrid analog/digital transceivers and application of low-resolution
digital-to-analog/analog-to-digital converters have been recently proposed. In
this work, we investigate the energy efficiency of quantized hybrid
transmitters equipped with a fully/partially-connected phase-shifting network
composed of active/passive phase-shifters and compare it to that of quantized
digital precoders. We introduce a quantized single-user MIMO system model based
on an additive quantization noise approximation considering realistic power
consumption and loss models to evaluate the spectral and energy efficiencies of
the transmit precoding methods. Simulation results show that
partially-connected hybrid precoders can be more energy-efficient compared to
digital precoders, while fully-connected hybrid precoders exhibit poor energy
efficiency in general. Also, the topology of phase-shifting components offers
an energy-spectral efficiency trade-off: active phase-shifters provide higher
data rates, while passive phase-shifters maintain better energy efficiency.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processin
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
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