5 research outputs found
Circuit-Aware Design of Energy-Efficient Massive MIMO Systems
Densification is a key to greater throughput in cellular networks. The full
potential of coordinated multipoint (CoMP) can be realized by massive
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where each base station (BS) has
very many antennas. However, the improved throughput comes at the price of more
infrastructure; hardware cost and circuit power consumption scale
linearly/affinely with the number of antennas. In this paper, we show that one
can make the circuit power increase with only the square root of the number of
antennas by circuit-aware system design. To this end, we derive achievable user
rates for a system model with hardware imperfections and show how the level of
imperfections can be gradually increased while maintaining high throughput. The
connection between this scaling law and the circuit power consumption is
established for different circuits at the BS.Comment: Published at International Symposium on Communications, Control, and
Signal Processing (ISCCSP 2014), 4 pages, 3 figures. This version corrects an
error related to Lemma
Massive MIMO with Non-Ideal Arbitrary Arrays: Hardware Scaling Laws and Circuit-Aware Design
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are cellular networks
where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with unconventionally many antennas,
deployed on co-located or distributed arrays. Huge spatial degrees-of-freedom
are achieved by coherent processing over these massive arrays, which provide
strong signal gains, resilience to imperfect channel knowledge, and low
interference. This comes at the price of more infrastructure; the hardware cost
and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of BS
antennas . Hence, the key to cost-efficient deployment of large arrays is
low-cost antenna branches with low circuit power, in contrast to today's
conventional expensive and power-hungry BS antenna branches. Such low-cost
transceivers are prone to hardware imperfections, but it has been conjectured
that the huge degrees-of-freedom would bring robustness to such imperfections.
We prove this claim for a generalized uplink system with multiplicative
phase-drifts, additive distortion noise, and noise amplification. Specifically,
we derive closed-form expressions for the user rates and a scaling law that
shows how fast the hardware imperfections can increase with while
maintaining high rates. The connection between this scaling law and the power
consumption of different transceiver circuits is rigorously exemplified. This
reveals that one can make the circuit power increase as , instead of
linearly, by careful circuit-aware system design.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications, 16 pages, 8 figures. The results can be reproduced using the
following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/hardware-scaling-law
I/Q Imbalance in Multiantenna Systems: Modeling, Analysis and RF-Aware Digital Beamforming
Wireless communications has experienced an unprecedented increase in data rates, numbers of active devices and selection of applications during recent years. However, this is expected to be just a start for future developments where a wireless connection is seen as a fundamental resource for almost any electrical device, no matter where and when it is operating. Since current radio technologies cannot provide such services with reasonable costs or even at all, a multitude of technological developments will be needed. One of the most important subjects, in addition to higher bandwidths and flexible network functionalities, is the exploitation of multiple antennas in base stations (BSs) as well as in user equipment (UEs). That kind of multiantenna communications can boost the capacity of an individual UE-BS link through spatial antenna multiplexing and increase the quality as well as robustness of the link via antenna diversity. Multiantenna technologies provide improvements also on the network level through spatial UE multiplexing and sophisticated interference management. Additionally, multiple antennas can provide savings in terms of the dissipated power since transmission and reception can be steered more efficiently in space, and thus power leakage to other directions is decreased. However, several issues need to be considered in order to get multiantenna technologies widely spread. First, antennas and the associated transceiver chains are required to be simple and implementable with low costs. Second, size of the antennas and transceivers need to be minimized. Finally, power consumption of the system must be kept under control. The importance of these requirements is even emphasized when considering massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems consisting of devices equipped with tens or even hundreds of antennas.In this thesis, we consider multiantenna devices where the associated transceiver chains are implemented in such a way that the requirements above can be met. In particular, we focus on the direct-conversion transceiver principle which is seen as a promising radio architecture for multiantenna systems due to its low costs, small size, low power consumption and good flexibility. Whereas these aspects are very promising, direct-conversion transceivers have also some disadvantages and are vulnerable to certain imperfections in the analog radio frequency (RF) electronics in particular. Since the effects of these imperfections usually get even worse when optimizing costs of the devices, the scope of the thesis is on the effects and mitigation of one of the most severe RF imperfection, namely in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalance.Contributions of the thesis can be split into two main themes. First of them is multiantenna narrowband beamforming under transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) I/Q imbalances. We start by creating a model for the signals at the TX and RX, both under I/Q imbalances. Based on these models we derive analytical expressions for the antenna array radiation patterns and notice that I/Q imbalance distorts not only the signals but also the radiation characteristics of the array. After that, stemming from the nature of the distortion, we utilize widely-linear (WL) processing, where the signals and their complex conjugates are processed jointly, for the beamforming task under I/Q imbalance. Such WL processing with different kind of statistical and adaptive beamforming algorithms is finally shown to provide a flexible operation as well as distortion-free signals and radiation patterns when being under various I/Q imbalance schemes.The second theme extends the work to wideband systems utilizing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based waveforms. The focus is on uplink communications and BS RX processing in a multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) scheme where spatial UE multiplexing is applied and further UE multiplexing takes place in frequency domain through the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) principle. Moreover, we include the effects of external co-channel interference into our analysis in order to model the challenges in heterogeneous networks. We formulate a flexible signal model for a generic uplink scheme where I/Q imbalance occurs on both TX and RX sides. Based on the model, we analyze the signal distortion in frequency domain and develop augmented RX processing methods which process signals at mirror subcarrier pairs jointly. Additionally, the proposed augmented methods are numerically shown to outperform corresponding per-subcarrier method in terms of the instantaneous signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR). Finally, we address some practical aspects and conclude that the augmented processing principle is a promising tool for RX processing in multiantenna wideband systems under I/Q imbalance.The thesis provides important insight for development of future radio networks. In particular, the results can be used as such for implementing digital signal processing (DSP)-based RF impairment mitigation in real world transceivers. Moreover, the results can be used as a starting point for future research concerning, e.g., joint effects of multiple RF impairments and their mitigation in multiantenna systems. Overall, this thesis and the associated publications can help the communications society to reach the ambitious aim of flexible, low-cost and high performance radio networks in the future