System capacity enhancement for 5G network and beyond

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe demand for wireless digital data is dramatically increasing year over year. Wireless communication systems like Laptops, Smart phones, Tablets, Smart watch, Virtual Reality devices and so on are becoming an important part of people’s daily life. The number of mobile devices is increasing at a very fast speed as well as the requirements for mobile devices such as super high-resolution image/video, fast download speed, very short latency and high reliability, which raise challenges to the existing wireless communication networks. Unlike the previous four generation communication networks, the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication network includes many technologies such as millimetre-wave communication, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), visual light communication (VLC), heterogeneous network (HetNet) and so forth. Although 5G has not been standardised yet, these above technologies have been studied in both academia and industry and the goal of the research is to enhance and improve the system capacity for 5G networks and beyond by studying some key problems and providing some effective solutions existing in the above technologies from system implementation and hardware impairments’ perspective. The key problems studied in this thesis include interference cancellation in HetNet, impairments calibration for massive MIMO, channel state estimation for VLC, and low latency parallel Turbo decoding technique. Firstly, inter-cell interference in HetNet is studied and a cell specific reference signal (CRS) interference cancellation method is proposed to mitigate the performance degrade in enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC). This method takes carrier frequency offset (CFO) and timing offset (TO) of the user’s received signal into account. By reconstructing the interfering signal and cancelling it afterwards, the capacity of HetNet is enhanced. Secondly, for massive MIMO systems, the radio frequency (RF) impairments of the hardware will degrade the beamforming performance. When operated in time duplex division (TDD) mode, a massive MIMO system relies on the reciprocity of the channel which can be broken by the transmitter and receiver RF impairments. Impairments calibration has been studied and a closed-loop reciprocity calibration method is proposed in this thesis. A test device (TD) is introduced in this calibration method that can estimate the transmitters’ impairments over-the-air and feed the results back to the base station via the Internet. The uplink pilots sent by the TD can assist the BS receivers’ impairment estimation. With both the uplink and downlink impairments estimates, the reciprocity calibration coefficients can be obtained. By computer simulation and lab experiment, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated. Channel coding is an essential part of a wireless communication system which helps fight with noise and get correct information delivery. Turbo codes is one of the most reliable codes that has been used in many standards such as WiMAX and LTE. However, the decoding process of turbo codes is time-consuming and the decoding latency should be improved to meet the requirement of the future network. A reverse interleave address generator is proposed that can reduce the decoding time and a low latency parallel turbo decoder has been implemented on a FPGA platform. The simulation and experiment results prove the effectiveness of the address generator and show that there is a trade-off between latency and throughput with a limited hardware resource. Apart from the above contributions, this thesis also investigated multi-user precoding for MIMO VLC systems. As a green and secure technology, VLC is achieving more and more attention and could become a part of 5G network especially for indoor communication. For indoor scenario, the MIMO VLC channel could be easily ill-conditioned. Hence, it is important to study the impact of the channel state to the precoding performance. A channel state estimation method is proposed based on the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the users’ received signal. Simulation results show that it can enhance the capacity of the indoor MIMO VLC system

Widely linear precoding for large-scale MIMO with IQI: Algorithms and performance analysis

In this paper, we study widely linear precoding techniques to mitigate in-phase/quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance (IQI) in the downlink of large-scale multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) systems. We adopt a real-valued signal model, which considers the IQI at the transmitter, and then develop widely linear zero-forcing (WL-ZF), widely linear matched filter, widely linear minimum mean-squared error, and widely linear block-diagonalization (WL-BD) type precoding algorithms for both single- and multiple-antenna users. We also present a performance analysis of WL-ZF and WL-BD. It is proved that without IQI, WL-ZF has exactly the same multiplexing gain and power offset as ZF, while when IQI exists, WL-ZF achieves the same multiplexing gain as ZF with ideal IQ branches, but with a minor power loss, which is related to the system scale and the IQ parameters. We also compare the performance of WL-BD with BD. The analysis shows that with ideal IQ branches, WL-BD has the same data rate as BD, while when IQI exists, WL-BD achieves the same multiplexing gain as BD without IQ imbalance. Numerical results verify the analysis and show that the proposed widely linear type precoding methods significantly outperform their conventional counterparts with IQI and approach those with ideal IQ branches

Distortion-Aware Linear Precoding for Massive MIMO Downlink Systems with Nonlinear Power Amplifiers

We introduce a framework for linear precoder design over a massive multiple-input multiple-output downlink system in the presence of nonlinear power amplifiers (PAs). By studying the spatial characteristics of the distortion, we demonstrate that conventional linear precoding techniques steer nonlinear distortions towards the users. We show that, by taking into account PA nonlinearity, one can design linear precoders that reduce, and in single-user scenarios, even completely remove the distortion transmitted in the direction of the users. This, however, is achieved at the price of a reduced array gain. To address this issue, we present precoder optimization algorithms that simultaneously take into account the effects of array gain, distortion, multiuser interference, and receiver noise. Specifically, we derive an expression for the achievable sum rate and propose an iterative algorithm that attempts to find the precoding matrix which maximizes this expression. Moreover, using a model for PA power consumption, we propose an algorithm that attempts to find the precoding matrix that minimizes the consumed power for a given minimum achievable sum rate. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed distortion-aware precoding techniques provide significant improvements in spectral and energy efficiency compared to conventional linear precoders.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure

Massive MIMO Systems with Hardware Imperfections

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented explosion in mobile data traffic, due to the expansion of numerous types of wireless devices. Moreover, each device needs a high throughput to support demanding applications such as real-time video, movie streaming and games. Thus, future wireless systems have to satisfy three main requirements: 1) having a high throughput; 2) simultaneously serving many users; and 3) less energy consumption. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems meet the aforementioned requirements and is nowadays a well-established technology which forms the backbone of the fifth-generation (5G) cellular communication systems.\ua0However, massive MIMO systems, i.e. employing hundreds or even thousands of antennas, will be a viable solution in the future only if low-cost and energy-efficient hardware is deployed. Unfortunately, low-cost, low-quality hardware is prone to hardware impairments such as in-phase and quadrature imbalance (IQI) and phase noise.\ua0\ua0Moreover, one of the dominant sources of power consumption in massive MIMO systems are the data converters at the BS. The baseband signal at each radio-frequency (RF) chain is generated by a pair of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The power consumption of these ADCs increases exponentially with the resolution (in bits) and linearly with the bandwidth. In conventional multi-antenna systems, each RF port is connected to a pair of high-resolution ADCs (e.g., 10-bit or more). For massive MIMO systems this would lead to prohibitively high-power consumption due to the large number of required ADCs. Hence, the ADC resolution must be limited to keep the power budget within tolerable levels.In this thesis, we investigate the performance of massive MIMO systems in non-ideal hardware. We begin with by studying the impact of IQI on massive MIMO systems. Important insights are gained through the analysis of system performance indicators, such as channel estimation and achievable rates by deriving tractable approximations of the ergodic spectral efficiency.First, a novel pilot-based joint estimator of the uplink augmented MIMO channel matrix and receiver IQI coefficients is described and then, a low-complexity IQI compensation scheme is proposed which is based on the receiver IQI coefficients\u27 estimation and it is independent of the channel gain.\ua0Second, we investigate the impact of the transceiver IQI in massive MIMO considering a time division duplexing (TDD) system where we assume uplink/downlink channel reciprocity in the downlink precoding design. The uplink channel estimation accuracy and the achievable downlink rate of the regularized zero-forcing (RZF) and maximum ratio transmission (MRT) is studied when there is mismatch between the uplink and downlink channels.\ua0Finally, we analyze the quantization distortion in limited-precision ADCs in uplink massive MIMO systems whose channel state information (CSI) is not known a priori to transmitter and receiver. We show that even a small percentage of clipped samples at the receiver can downgrade considerably the systems performance and propose near-optimal low-complexity solutions to reconstruct the clipped signal