Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity

Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging 5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-of-Things (IoT) is still a developing topic, as IoT connectivity has requirements and constraints that are significantly different from the broadband connections. In this paper we investigate the applicability of massive MIMO to IoT connectivity. Specifically, we treat the two generic types of IoT connections envisioned in 5G: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). This paper fills this important gap by identifying the opportunities and challenges in exploiting massive MIMO for IoT connectivity. We provide insights into the trade-offs that emerge when massive MIMO is applied to mMTC or URLLC and present a number of suitable communication schemes. The discussion continues to the questions of network slicing of the wireless resources and the use of massive MIMO to simultaneously support IoT connections with very heterogeneous requirements. The main conclusion is that massive MIMO can bring benefits to the scenarios with IoT connectivity, but it requires tight integration of the physical-layer techniques with the protocol design.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example, prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin

Massive MIMO for Wireless Sensing with a Coherent Multiple Access Channel

We consider the detection and estimation of a zero-mean Gaussian signal in a wireless sensor network with a coherent multiple access channel, when the fusion center (FC) is configured with a large number of antennas and the wireless channels between the sensor nodes and FC experience Rayleigh fading. For the detection problem, we study the Neyman-Pearson (NP) Detector and Energy Detector (ED), and find optimal values for the sensor transmission gains. For the NP detector which requires channel state information (CSI), we show that detection performance remains asymptotically constant with the number of FC antennas if the sensor transmit power decreases proportionally with the increase in the number of antennas. Performance bounds show that the benefit of multiple antennas at the FC disappears as the transmit power grows. The results of the NP detector are also generalized to the linear minimum mean squared error estimator. For the ED which does not require CSI, we derive optimal gains that maximize the deflection coefficient of the detector, and we show that a constant deflection can be asymptotically achieved if the sensor transmit power scales as the inverse square root of the number of FC antennas. Unlike the NP detector, for high sensor power the multi-antenna ED is observed to empirically have significantly better performance than the single-antenna implementation. A number of simulation results are included to validate the analysis.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Feb. 201

An Overview of Massive MIMO Technology Components in METIS

As the standardization of full-dimension MIMO systems in the Third Generation Partnership Project progresses, the research community has started to explore the potential of very large arrays as an enabler technology for meeting the requirements of fifth generation systems. Indeed, in its final deliverable, the European 5G project METIS identifies massive MIMO as a key 5G enabler and proposes specific technology components that will allow the cost-efficient deployment of cellular systems taking advantage of hundreds of antennas at cellular base stations. These technology components include handling the inherent pilot-data resource allocation trade-off in a near optimal fashion, a novel random access scheme supporting a large number of users, coded channel state information for sparse channels in frequency-division duplexing systems, managing user grouping and multi-user beamforming, and a decentralized coordinated transceiver design. The aggregate effect of these components enables massive MIMO to contribute to the METIS objectives of delivering very high data rates and managing dense populations

Random Access Protocols for Massive MIMO

5G wireless networks are expected to support new services with stringent requirements on data rates, latency and reliability. One novel feature is the ability to serve a dense crowd of devices, calling for radically new ways of accessing the network. This is the case in machine-type communications, but also in urban environments and hotspots. In those use cases, the high number of devices and the relatively short channel coherence interval do not allow per-device allocation of orthogonal pilot sequences. This article motivates the need for random access by the devices to pilot sequences used for channel estimation, and shows that Massive MIMO is a main enabler to achieve fast access with high data rates, and delay-tolerant access with different data rate levels. Three pilot access protocols along with data transmission protocols are described, fulfilling different requirements of 5G services

Bilinear Expectation Propagation for Distributed Semi-Blind Joint Channel Estimation and Data Detection in Cell-Free Massive MIMO

We consider a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-MaMIMO) communication system in the uplink transmission and propose a novel algorithm for blind or semi-blind joint channel estimation and data detection (JCD). We formulate the problem in the framework of bilinear inference and develop a solution based on the expectation propagation (EP) method for both channel estimation and data detection. We propose a new approximation of the joint a posteriori distribution of the channel and data whose representation as a factor graph enables the application of the EP approach using the message-passing technique, local low-complexity computations at the nodes, and an effective modeling of channel-data interplay. The derived algorithm, called bilinear-EP JCD, allows for a distributed implementation among access points (APs) and the central processing unit (CPU) and has polynomial complexity. Our simulation results show that it outperforms other EP-based state-of-the-art polynomial time algorithms.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, to be printed in IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processin

Cell-Free Massive MIMO versus Small Cells

A Cell-Free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) system comprises a very large number of distributed access points (APs)which simultaneously serve a much smaller number of users over the same time/frequency resources based on directly measured channel characteristics. The APs and users have only one antenna each. The APs acquire channel state information through time-division duplex operation and the reception of uplink pilot signals transmitted by the users. The APs perform multiplexing/de-multiplexing through conjugate beamforming on the downlink and matched filtering on the uplink. Closed-form expressions for individual user uplink and downlink throughputs lead to max-min power control algorithms. Max-min power control ensures uniformly good service throughout the area of coverage. A pilot assignment algorithm helps to mitigate the effects of pilot contamination, but power control is far more important in that regard. Cell-Free Massive MIMO has considerably improved performance with respect to a conventional small-cell scheme, whereby each user is served by a dedicated AP, in terms of both 95%-likely per-user throughput and immunity to shadow fading spatial correlation. Under uncorrelated shadow fading conditions, the cell-free scheme provides nearly 5-fold improvement in 95%-likely per-user throughput over the small-cell scheme, and 10-fold improvement when shadow fading is correlated.Comment: EEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, accepted for publicatio

Mobile Cell-Free Massive MIMO: Challenges, Solutions, and Future Directions

Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which exploit many geographically distributed access points to coherently serve user equipments via spatial multiplexing on the same time-frequency resource, has become a vital component of the next-generation mobile communication networks. Theoretically, CF massive MIMO systems have many advantages, such as large capacity, great coverage, and high reliability, but several obstacles must be overcome. In this article, we study the paradigm of CF massive MIMO-aided mobile communications, including the main application scenarios and associated deployment architectures. Furthermore, we thoroughly investigate the challenges of CF massive MIMO-aided mobile communications. We then exploit a novel predictor antenna, hierarchical cancellation, rate-splitting and dynamic clustering system for CF massive MIMO. Finally, several important research directions regarding CF massive MIMO for mobile communications are presented to facilitate further investigation.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin