3,412 research outputs found
On the distribution of an effective channel estimator for multi-cell massive MIMO
Accurate channel estimation is of utmost importance for massive MIMO systems to provide significant improvements in spectral and energy efficiency. In this work, we present a study on the distribution of a simple but yet effective and practical channel estimator for multi-cell massive MIMO systems suffering from pilot-contamination. The proposed channel estimator performs well under moderate to aggressive pilot contamination scenarios without previous knowledge of the inter-cell large-scale channel coefficients and noise power, asymptotically approximating the performance of the linear MMSE estimator as the number of antennas increases. We prove that the distribution of the proposed channel estimator can be accurately approximated by the circularly-symmetric complex normal distribution, when the number of antennas, M, deployed at the base station is greater than 10
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
Joint Power Allocation and User Association Optimization for Massive MIMO Systems
This paper investigates the joint power allocation and user association
problem in multi-cell Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) downlink
(DL) systems. The target is to minimize the total transmit power consumption
when each user is served by an optimized subset of the base stations (BSs),
using non-coherent joint transmission. We first derive a lower bound on the
ergodic spectral efficiency (SE), which is applicable for any channel
distribution and precoding scheme. Closed-form expressions are obtained for
Rayleigh fading channels with either maximum ratio transmission (MRT) or zero
forcing (ZF) precoding. From these bounds, we further formulate the DL power
minimization problems with fixed SE constraints for the users. These problems
are proved to be solvable as linear programs, giving the optimal power
allocation and BS-user association with low complexity. Furthermore, we
formulate a max-min fairness problem which maximizes the worst SE among the
users, and we show that it can be solved as a quasi-linear program. Simulations
manifest that the proposed methods provide good SE for the users using less
transmit power than in small-scale systems and the optimal user association can
effectively balance the load between BSs when needed. Even though our framework
allows the joint transmission from multiple BSs, there is an overwhelming
probability that only one BS is associated with each user at the optimal
solution.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, Accepted by IEEE Trans. Wireless Commu
Random Pilot and Data Access in Massive MIMO for Machine-type Communications
A massive MIMO system, represented by a base station with hundreds of
antennas, is capable of spatially multiplexing many devices and thus naturally
suited to serve dense crowds of wireless devices in emerging applications, such
as machine-type communications. Crowd scenarios pose new challenges in the
pilot-based acquisition of channel state information and call for pilot access
protocols that match the intermittent pattern of device activity. A joint pilot
assignment and data transmission protocol based on random access is proposed in
this paper for the uplink of a massive MIMO system. The protocol relies on the
averaging across multiple transmission slots of the pilot collision events that
result from the random access process. We derive new uplink sum rate
expressions that take pilot collisions, intermittent device activity, and
interference into account. Simplified bounds are obtained and used to optimize
the device activation probability and pilot length. A performance analysis
indicates how performance scales as a function of the number of antennas and
the transmission slot duration
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