20,034 research outputs found
Ubiquitous Cell-Free Massive MIMO Communications
Since the first cellular networks were trialled in the 1970s, we have
witnessed an incredible wireless revolution. From 1G to 4G, the massive traffic
growth has been managed by a combination of wider bandwidths, refined radio
interfaces, and network densification, namely increasing the number of antennas
per site. Due its cost-efficiency, the latter has contributed the most. Massive
MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a key 5G technology that uses massive
antenna arrays to provide a very high beamforming gain and spatially
multiplexing of users, and hence, increases the spectral and energy efficiency.
It constitutes a centralized solution to densify a network, and its performance
is limited by the inter-cell interference inherent in its cell-centric design.
Conversely, ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO refers to a distributed Massive
MIMO system implementing coherent user-centric transmission to overcome the
inter-cell interference limitation in cellular networks and provide additional
macro-diversity. These features, combined with the system scalability inherent
in the Massive MIMO design, distinguishes ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO
from prior coordinated distributed wireless systems. In this article, we
investigate the enormous potential of this promising technology while
addressing practical deployment issues to deal with the increased
back/front-hauling overhead deriving from the signal co-processing.Comment: Published in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and
Networking on August 5, 201
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
Matching Theory for Backhaul Management in Small Cell Networks with mmWave Capabilities
Designing cost-effective and scalable backhaul solutions is one of the main
challenges for emerging wireless small cell networks (SCNs). In this regard,
millimeter wave (mmW) communication technologies have recently emerged as an
attractive solution to realize the vision of a high-speed and reliable wireless
small cell backhaul network (SCBN). In this paper, a novel approach is proposed
for managing the spectral resources of a heterogeneous SCBN that can exploit
simultaneously mmW and conventional frequency bands via carrier aggregation. In
particular, a new SCBN model is proposed in which small cell base stations
(SCBSs) equipped with broadband fiber backhaul allocate their frequency
resources to SCBSs with wireless backhaul, by using aggregated bands. One
unique feature of the studied model is that it jointly accounts for both
wireless channel characteristics and economic factors during resource
allocation. The problem is then formulated as a one-to-many matching game and a
distributed algorithm is proposed to find a stable outcome of the game. The
convergence of the algorithm is proven and the properties of the resulting
matching are studied. Simulation results show that under the constraints of
wireless backhauling, the proposed approach achieves substantial performance
gains, reaching up to compared to a conventional best-effort approach.Comment: In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Communications
(ICC), Mobile and Wireless Networks Symposium, London, UK, June 201
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