12,975 research outputs found
Massive MIMO for Next Generation Wireless Systems
Multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) offers big advantages over
conventional point-to-point MIMO: it works with cheap single-antenna terminals,
a rich scattering environment is not required, and resource allocation is
simplified because every active terminal utilizes all of the time-frequency
bins. However, multi-user MIMO, as originally envisioned with roughly equal
numbers of service-antennas and terminals and frequency division duplex
operation, is not a scalable technology. Massive MIMO (also known as
"Large-Scale Antenna Systems", "Very Large MIMO", "Hyper MIMO", "Full-Dimension
MIMO" & "ARGOS") makes a clean break with current practice through the use of a
large excess of service-antennas over active terminals and time division duplex
operation. Extra antennas help by focusing energy into ever-smaller regions of
space to bring huge improvements in throughput and radiated energy efficiency.
Other benefits of massive MIMO include the extensive use of inexpensive
low-power components, reduced latency, simplification of the media access
control (MAC) layer, and robustness to intentional jamming. The anticipated
throughput depend on the propagation environment providing asymptotically
orthogonal channels to the terminals, but so far experiments have not disclosed
any limitations in this regard. While massive MIMO renders many traditional
research problems irrelevant, it uncovers entirely new problems that urgently
need attention: the challenge of making many low-cost low-precision components
that work effectively together, acquisition and synchronization for
newly-joined terminals, the exploitation of extra degrees of freedom provided
by the excess of service-antennas, reducing internal power consumption to
achieve total energy efficiency reductions, and finding new deployment
scenarios. This paper presents an overview of the massive MIMO concept and
contemporary research.Comment: Final manuscript, to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin
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
Waveforms for the Massive MIMO Downlink: Amplifier Efficiency, Distortion and Performance
In massive MIMO, most precoders result in downlink signals that suffer from
high PAR, independently of modulation order and whether single-carrier or OFDM
transmission is used. The high PAR lowers the power efficiency of the base
station amplifiers. To increase power efficiency, low-PAR precoders have been
proposed. In this article, we compare different transmission schemes for
massive MIMO in terms of the power consumed by the amplifiers. It is found that
(i) OFDM and single-carrier transmission have the same performance over a
hardened massive MIMO channel and (ii) when the higher amplifier power
efficiency of low-PAR precoding is taken into account, conventional and low-PAR
precoders lead to approximately the same power consumption. Since downlink
signals with low PAR allow for simpler and cheaper hardware, than signals with
high PAR, therefore, the results suggest that low-PAR precoding with either
single-carrier or OFDM transmission should be used in a massive MIMO base
station
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