Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or "promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality. Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun. The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO, Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin

Performance Analysis of Channel Extrapolation in FDD Massive MIMO Systems

Channel estimation for the downlink of frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO systems is well known to generate a large overhead as the amount of training generally scales with the number of transmit antennas in a MIMO system. In this paper, we consider the solution of extrapolating the channel frequency response from uplink pilot estimates to the downlink frequency band, which completely removes the training overhead. We first show that conventional estimators fail to achieve reasonable accuracy. We propose instead to use high-resolution channel estimation. We derive theoretical lower bounds (LB) for the mean squared error (MSE) of the extrapolated channel. Assuming that the paths are well separated, the LB is simplified in an expression that gives considerable physical insight. It is then shown that the MSE is inversely proportional to the number of receive antennas while the extrapolation performance penalty scales with the square of the ratio of the frequency offset and the training bandwidth. The channel extrapolation performance is validated through numeric simulations and experimental measurements taken in an anechoic chamber. Our main conclusion is that channel extrapolation is a viable solution for FDD massive MIMO systems if accurate system calibration is performed and favorable propagation conditions are present.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1902.0684

Hybrid Precoding for Multiuser Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Systems : A Deep Learning Approach

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In multi-user millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, hybrid precoding is a crucial task to lower the complexity and cost while achieving a sufficient sum-rate. Previous works on hybrid precoding were usually based on optimization or greedy approaches. These methods either provide higher complexity or have sub-optimum performance. Moreover, the performance of these methods mostly relies on the quality of the channel data. In this work, we propose a deep learning (DL) framework to improve the performance and provide less computation time as compared to conventional techniques. In fact, we design a convolutional neural network for MIMO (CNN-MIMO) that accepts as input an imperfect channel matrix and gives the analog precoder and combiners at the output. The procedure includes two main stages. First, we develop an exhaustive search algorithm to select the analog precoder and combiners from a predefined codebook maximizing the achievable sum-rate. Then, the selected precoder and combiners are used as output labels in the training stage of CNN-MIMO where the input-output pairs are obtained. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method through numerous and extensive simulations and show that the proposed DL framework outperforms conventional techniques. Overall, CNN-MIMO provides a robust hybrid precoding scheme in the presence of imperfections regarding the channel matrix. On top of this, the proposed approach exhibits less computation time with comparison to the optimization and codebook based approaches.Peer reviewe