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

A framework for joint design of pilot sequence and linear precoder

Most performance measures of pilot-assisted multiple-input multiple-output systems are functions of the linear precoder and the pilot sequence. A framework for the optimization of these two parameters is proposed, based on a matrix-valued generalization of the concept of effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) introduced in the famous work by Hassibi and Hochwald. Our framework aims to extend the work of Hassibi and Hochwald by allowing for transmit-side fading correlations, and by considering a class of utility functions of said effective SNR matrix, most notably including the well-known capacity lower bound used by Hassibi and Hochwald. We tackle the joint optimization problem by recasting the optimization of the precoder (resp. pilot sequence) subject to a fixed pilot sequence (resp. precoder) into a convex problem. Furthermore, we prove that joint optimality requires that the eigenbases of the precoder and pilot sequence be both aligned along the eigenbasis of the channel correlation matrix. We finally describe how to wrap all studied subproblems into an iteration that converges to a local optimum of the joint optimization.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Joint Precoder and Artificial Noise Design for MIMO Wiretap Channels with Finite-Alphabet Inputs Based on the Cut-Off Rate

We consider precoder and artificial noise (AN) design for multi-antenna wiretap channels under the finite-alphabet input assumption. We assume that the transmitter has access to the channel coefficients of the legitimate receiver and knows the statistics of the eavesdropper's channel. Accordingly, we propose a secrecy rate maximization algorithm using a gradient descent-based optimization of the precoder matrix and an exhaustive search over the power levels allocated to the AN. We also propose algorithms to reduce the complexities of direct ergodic secrecy rate maximization by: 1) maximizing a cut-off rate-based approximation for the ergodic secrecy rate, simplifying the mutual information expression, which lacks a closed-form and 2) diagonalizing the channels toward the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper, which allows for employing a per-group precoding-based technique. Our numerical results reveal that jointly optimizing the precoder and the AN outperforms the existing solutions in the literature, which rely on the precoder optimization only. We also demonstrate that the proposed low complexity alternatives result in a small loss in performance while offering a significant reduction in computational complexity. © 2002-2012 IEEE

On the Impact of Phase Noise in Communication Systems –- Performance Analysis and Algorithms

The mobile industry is preparing to scale up the network capacity by a factor of 1000x in order to cope with the staggering growth in mobile traffic. As a consequence, there is a tremendous pressure on the network infrastructure, where more cost-effective, flexible, high speed connectivity solutions are being sought for. In this regard, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, and millimeter-wave communication systems are new physical layer technologies, which promise to facilitate the 1000 fold increase in network capacity. However, these technologies are extremely prone to hardware impairments like phase noise caused by noisy oscillators. Furthermore, wireless backhaul networks are an effective solution to transport data by using high-order signal constellations, which are also susceptible to phase noise impairments. Analyzing the performance of wireless communication systems impaired by oscillator phase noise, and designing systems to operate efficiently in strong phase noise conditions are critical problems in communication theory. The criticality of these problems is accentuated with the growing interest in new physical layer technologies, and the deployment of wireless backhaul networks. This forms the main motivation for this thesis where we analyze the impact of phase noise on the system performance, and we also design algorithms in order to mitigate phase noise and its effects. First, we address the problem of maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection of data in the presence of strong phase noise in single-antenna systems. This is achieved by designing a low-complexity joint phase-estimator data-detector. We show that the proposed method outperforms existing detectors, especially when high order signal constellations are used. Then, in order to further improve system performance, we consider the problem of optimizing signal constellations for transmission over channels impaired by phase noise. Specifically, we design signal constellations such that the error rate performance of the system is minimized, and the information rate of the system is maximized. We observe that these optimized constellations significantly improve the system performance, when compared to conventional constellations, and those proposed in the literature. Next, we derive the MAP symbol detector for a MIMO system where each antenna at the transceiver has its own oscillator. We propose three suboptimal, low-complexity algorithms for approximately implementing the MAP symbol detector, which involve joint phase noise estimation and data detection. We observe that the proposed techniques significantly outperform the other algorithms in prior works. Finally, we study the impact of phase noise on the performance of a massive MIMO system, where we analyze both uplink and downlink performances. Based on rigorous analyses of the achievable rates, we provide interesting insights for the following question: how should oscillators be connected to the antennas at a base station, which employs a large number of antennas

Exploiting channel symmetry in two-way channels

Wireless communication is frequently employed for the bi-directional exchange of information between devices with disparate capabilities. Mobile devices such as cellular phones and laptops are subject to stringent size weight and power constraints relative to the base stations or access points they communicate with. Asymmetry of constraints results in asymmetry of the cost of computation. This disparity in cost motivates efforts to shift signal processing such as channel estimation and equalization from cost sensitive devices to those with more relaxed constraints. In this work we develop a two-way training channel estimation and precoding scheme that shifts all the computation involved in dealing with multiplicative channel gain as well as frequency selective channels to the base station. This work demonstrates the first tractable implementation of a precoding based transceiver scheme of this class on the Rice University Wireless Open Access Research Platform (WARP)