Massive MIMO Systems with Non-Ideal Hardware: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits

The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases, thus strong signal gains are achievable with little inter-user interference. Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE. Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and inter-user interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and energy-efficient antenna elements.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28 pages, 15 figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/massive-MIMO-hardware-impairment

Relaying systems with reciprocity mismatch : impact analysis and calibration

Cooperative beamforming can provide significant performance improvement for relaying systems with the help of the channel state information (CSI). In time-division duplexing (TDD) mode, the estimated CSI will deteriorate due to the reciprocity mismatch. In this work, we examine the impact and the calibration of the reciprocity mismatch in relaying systems. To evaluate the impact of the reciprocity mismatch for all devices, the closed-form expression of the achievable rate is first derived. Then, we analyze the performance loss caused by the reciprocity mismatch at sources, relays, and destinations respectively to show that the mismatch at relays dominates the impact. To compensate the performance loss, a two-stage calibration scheme is proposed for relays. Specifically, relays perform the intra-calibration based on circuits independently. Further, the inter-calibration based on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codebook is operated to improve the calibration performance by cooperation transmission, which has never been considered in previous work. Finally, we derive the achievable rate after relays perform the proposed reciprocity calibration scheme and investigate the impact of estimation errors on the system performance. Simulation results are presented to verify the analytical results and to show the performance of the proposed calibration approach

Massive MIMO 시스템을 위한 채널 추정 및 피드백 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2017. 2. 이정우.To meet the demand of high throughput in next generation wireless systems, various directions for physical layer evolution are being explored. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, characterized by a large number of antennas at the transmitter, are expected to become a key enabler for spectral efficiency improvement. In massive MIMO systems, thanks to the orthogonality between different users' channels, high spectral and energy efficiency can be achieved through simple signal processing techniques. However, to get such advantages, accurate channel state information (CSI) needs to be available, and acquiring CSI in massive MIMO systems is challenging due to the increased channel dimension. In frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems, where CSI at the transmitter is achieved through downlink training and uplink feedback, the overhead for the training and feedback increases proportionally to the number of antennas, and the resource for data transmission becomes scarce in massive MIMO systems. In time division duplexing (TDD) systems, where the channel reciprocity holds and the downlink CSI can be obtained through uplink training, pilot contamination due to correlated pilots becomes a performance bottleneck when the number of antennas increases. In this dissertation, I propose efficient CSI acquisition techniques for various massive MIMO systems. First, I develop a downlink training technique for FDD massive MIMO systems, which estimates the downlink channel with small overhead. To this end, compressed sensing tools are utilized, and the training overhead can be highly reduced by exploiting the previous channel information. Next, a limited feedback scheme is developed for FDD massive MIMO systems. The proposed scheme reduces the feedback overhead using a dimension reduction technique that exploits spatial and temporal correlation of the channel. Lastly, I analyze the effect of pilot contamination, which has been regarded as a performance bottleneck in multi-cell massive MIMO systems, and propose two uplink training strategies. An iterative pilot design scheme is developed for small networks, and a scalable training framework is also proposed for networks with many cells.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Massive MIMO 1 1.2 CSI Acquisition in Massive MIMO Systems 3 1.3 Contributions and Organization 6 1.4 Notations 7 2 Compressed Sensing-Aided Downlink Training 9 2.1 Introduction 10 2.2 System Model 13 2.2.1 Channel Model 13 2.2.2 Downlink Channel Estimation 16 2.3 CS-Aided Channel Training 19 2.3.1 Training Sequence Design 20 2.3.2 Channel Estimation 21 2.3.3 Estimation Error 23 2.4 Discussions 26 2.4.1 Design of Measurement Matrix 26 2.4.2 Extension to MIMO Systems 27 2.4.3 Comparison to CS with Partial Support Information 28 2.5 Simulation Results 29 2.6 Conclusion 37 3 Projection-Based Differential Feedback 39 3.1 Introduction 40 3.2 System Model 44 3.2.1 Multi-User Beamforming with Limited Feedback 45 3.2.2 Massive MIMO Channel 47 3.3 Projection-Based Differential Feedback 48 3.3.1 Projection-Based Differential Feedback Framework 48 3.3.2 Projection for PBDF Framework 51 3.3.3 Efficient Algorithm 57 3.4 Discussions 58 3.4.1 Projection with Imperfect CSIR 58 3.4.2 Acquisition of Channel Statistics 61 3.5 Simulation Results 62 3.6 Conclusion 69 4 Mitigating Pilot Contamination via Pilot Design 71 4.1 Introduction 72 4.2 System Model 73 4.2.1 Multi-cell Massive MIMO Systems 74 4.2.2 Uplink Channel Training 75 4.2.3 Data Transmission 77 4.3 Iterative Pilot Design Algorithm 78 4.3.1 Algorithm 79 4.3.2 Proof of Convergence 81 4.4 Generalized Pilot Reuse 81 4.4.1 Concept of Pilot Reuse Schemes 81 4.4.2 Pilot Design based on Grassmannian Subspace Packing 82 4.5 Simulation Results 85 4.5.1 Iterative Pilot Design 85 4.5.2 Generalized Pilot Reuse 87 4.6 Conclusion 89 5 Conclusion 91 5.1 Summary 91 5.2 Future Directions 93 Bibliography 96 Abstract (In Korean) 109Docto