2,274 research outputs found
Group Sparse Precoding for Cloud-RAN with Multiple User Antennas
Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has become a promising network
architecture to support the massive data traffic in the next generation
cellular networks. In a C-RAN, a massive number of low-cost remote antenna
ports (RAPs) are connected to a single baseband unit (BBU) pool via high-speed
low-latency fronthaul links, which enables efficient resource allocation and
interference management. As the RAPs are geographically distributed, the group
sparse beamforming schemes attracts extensive studies, where a subset of RAPs
is assigned to be active and a high spectral efficiency can be achieved.
However, most studies assumes that each user is equipped with a single antenna.
How to design the group sparse precoder for the multiple antenna users remains
little understood, as it requires the joint optimization of the mutual coupling
transmit and receive beamformers. This paper formulates an optimal joint RAP
selection and precoding design problem in a C-RAN with multiple antennas at
each user. Specifically, we assume a fixed transmit power constraint for each
RAP, and investigate the optimal tradeoff between the sum rate and the number
of active RAPs. Motivated by the compressive sensing theory, this paper
formulates the group sparse precoding problem by inducing the -norm as
a penalty and then uses the reweighted heuristic to find a solution.
By adopting the idea of block diagonalization precoding, the problem can be
formulated as a convex optimization, and an efficient algorithm is proposed
based on its Lagrangian dual. Simulation results verify that our proposed
algorithm can achieve almost the same sum rate as that obtained from exhaustive
search
Receive Combining vs. Multi-Stream Multiplexing in Downlink Systems with Multi-Antenna Users
In downlink multi-antenna systems with many users, the multiplexing gain is
strictly limited by the number of transmit antennas and the use of these
antennas. Assuming that the total number of receive antennas at the
multi-antenna users is much larger than , the maximal multiplexing gain can
be achieved with many different transmission/reception strategies. For example,
the excess number of receive antennas can be utilized to schedule users with
effective channels that are near-orthogonal, for multi-stream multiplexing to
users with well-conditioned channels, and/or to enable interference-aware
receive combining. In this paper, we try to answer the question if the data
streams should be divided among few users (many streams per user) or many users
(few streams per user, enabling receive combining). Analytic results are
derived to show how user selection, spatial correlation, heterogeneous user
conditions, and imperfect channel acquisition (quantization or estimation
errors) affect the performance when sending the maximal number of streams or
one stream per scheduled user---the two extremes in data stream allocation.
While contradicting observations on this topic have been reported in prior
works, we show that selecting many users and allocating one stream per user
(i.e., exploiting receive combining) is the best candidate under realistic
conditions. This is explained by the provably stronger resilience towards
spatial correlation and the larger benefit from multi-user diversity. This
fundamental result has positive implications for the design of downlink systems
as it reduces the hardware requirements at the user devices and simplifies the
throughput optimization.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 16 pages, 11
figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code:
https://github.com/emilbjornson/one-or-multiple-stream
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