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

Space-based Aperture Array For Ultra-Long Wavelength Radio Astronomy

The past decade has seen the rise of various radio astronomy arrays, particularly for low-frequency observations below 100MHz. These developments have been primarily driven by interesting and fundamental scientific questions, such as studying the dark ages and epoch of re-ionization, by detecting the highly red-shifted 21cm line emission. However, Earth-based radio astronomy below frequencies of 30MHz is severely restricted due to man-made interference, ionospheric distortion and almost complete non-transparency of the ionosphere below 10MHz. Therefore, this narrow spectral band remains possibly the last unexplored frequency range in radio astronomy. A straightforward solution to study the universe at these frequencies is to deploy a space-based antenna array far away from Earths' ionosphere. Various studies in the past were principally limited by technology and computing resources, however current processing and communication trends indicate otherwise. We briefly present the achievable science cases, and discuss the system design for selected scenarios, such as extra-galactic surveys. An extensive discussion is presented on various sub-systems of the potential satellite array, such as radio astronomical antenna design, the on-board signal processing, communication architectures and joint space-time estimation of the satellite network. In light of a scalable array and to avert single point of failure, we propose both centralized and distributed solutions for the ULW space-based array. We highlight the benefits of various deployment locations and summarize the technological challenges for future space-based radio arrays.Comment: Submitte

Space-time-frequency methods for interference-limited communication systems

textTraditionally, noise in communication systems has been modeled as an additive, white Gaussian noise process with independent, identically distributed samples. Although this model accurately reflects thermal noise present in communication system electronics, it fails to capture the statistics of interference and other sources of noise, e.g. in unlicensed communication bands. Modern communication system designers must take into account interference and non-Gaussian noise to maximize efficiencies and capacities of current and future communication networks. In this work, I develop new multi-dimensional signal processing methods to improve performance of communication systems in three applications areas: (i) underwater acoustic, (ii) powerline, and (iii) multi-antenna cellular. In underwater acoustic communications, I address impairments caused by strong, time-varying and Doppler-spread reverberations (self-interference) using adaptive space-time signal processing methods. I apply these methods to array receivers with a large number of elements. In powerline communications, I address impairments caused by non-Gaussian noise arising from devices sharing the powerline. I develop and apply a cyclic adaptive modulation and coding scheme and a factor-graph-based impulsive noise mitigation method to improve signal quality and boost link throughput and robustness. In cellular communications, I develop a low-latency, high-throughput space-time-frequency processing framework used for large scale (up to 128 antenna) MIMO. This framework is used in the world's first 100-antenna MIMO system and processes up to 492 Gbps raw baseband samples in the uplink and downlink directions. My methods prove that multi-dimensional processing methods can be applied to increase communication system performance without sacrificing real-time requirements.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Quantifying Potential Energy Efficiency Gain in Green Cellular Wireless Networks

Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose of providing high throughput for the user and high capacity for the service provider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, these networks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe the sources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of the studies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discuss how much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbon footprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specific sources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physical layer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. In particular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellular wireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks and point to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use base station energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reduce this inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By a consideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that an improvement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two orders of magnitude, or even more, is possible.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1210.843