Electromagnetic Lens-focusing Antenna Enabled Massive MIMO: Performance Improvement and Cost Reduction

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been recently advanced to tremendously improve the performance of wireless communication networks. However, the use of very large antenna arrays at the base stations (BSs) brings new issues, such as the significantly increased hardware and signal processing costs. In order to reap the enormous gain of massive MIMO and yet reduce its cost to an affordable level, this paper proposes a novel system design by integrating an electromagnetic (EM) lens with the large antenna array, termed the EM-lens enabled MIMO. The EM lens has the capability of focusing the power of an incident wave to a small area of the antenna array, while the location of the focal area varies with the angle of arrival (AoA) of the wave. Therefore, in practical scenarios where the arriving signals from geographically separated users have different AoAs, the EM-lens enabled system provides two new benefits, namely energy focusing and spatial interference rejection. By taking into account the effects of imperfect channel estimation via pilot-assisted training, in this paper we analytically show that the average received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in both the single-user and multiuser uplink transmissions can be strictly improved by the EM-lens enabled system. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed design makes it possible to considerably reduce the hardware and signal processing costs with only slight degradations in performance. To this end, two complexity/cost reduction schemes are proposed, which are small-MIMO processing with parallel receiver filtering applied over subgroups of antennas to reduce the computational complexity, and channel covariance based antenna selection to reduce the required number of radio frequency (RF) chains. Numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure

Adaptive Multicell 3D Beamforming in Multi-Antenna Cellular Networks

We consider a cellular network with multi-antenna base stations (BSs) and single-antenna users, multicell cooperation, imperfect channel state information, and directional antennas each with a vertically adjustable beam. We investigate the impact of the elevation angle of the BS antenna pattern, denoted as tilt, on the performance of the considered network when employing either a conventional single-cell transmission or a fully cooperative multicell transmission. Using the results of this investigation, we propose a novel hybrid multicell cooperation technique in which the intercell interference is controlled via either cooperative beamforming in the horizontal plane or coordinated beamfroming in the vertical plane of the wireless channel, denoted as adaptive multicell 3D beamforming. The main idea is to divide the coverage area into two disjoint vertical regions and adapt the multicell cooperation strategy at the BSs when serving each region. A fair scheduler is used to share the time-slots between the vertical regions. It is shown that the proposed technique can achieve performance comparable to that of a fully cooperative transmission but with a significantly lower complexity and signaling requirements. To make the performance analysis computationally efficient, analytical expressions for the user ergodic rates under different beamforming strategies are also derived.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technolog

Scaling up MIMO: Opportunities and Challenges with Very Large Arrays

This paper surveys recent advances in the area of very large MIMO systems. With very large MIMO, we think of systems that use antenna arrays with an order of magnitude more elements than in systems being built today, say a hundred antennas or more. Very large MIMO entails an unprecedented number of antennas simultaneously serving a much smaller number of terminals. The disparity in number emerges as a desirable operating condition and a practical one as well. The number of terminals that can be simultaneously served is limited, not by the number of antennas, but rather by our inability to acquire channel-state information for an unlimited number of terminals. Larger numbers of terminals can always be accommodated by combining very large MIMO technology with conventional time- and frequency-division multiplexing via OFDM. Very large MIMO arrays is a new research field both in communication theory, propagation, and electronics and represents a paradigm shift in the way of thinking both with regards to theory, systems and implementation. The ultimate vision of very large MIMO systems is that the antenna array would consist of small active antenna units, plugged into an (optical) fieldbus.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, October 201

Achieving Large Multiplexing Gain in Distributed Antenna Systems via Cooperation with pCell Technology

In this paper we present pCellTM technology, the first commercial-grade wireless system that employs cooperation between distributed transceiver stations to create concurrent data links to multiple users in the same spectrum. First we analyze the per-user signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) employing a geometrical spatial channel model to define volumes in space of coherent signal around user antennas (or personal cells, i.e., pCells). Then we describe the system architecture consisting of a general-purpose-processor (GPP) based software-defined radio (SDR) wireless platform implementing a real-time LTE protocol stack to communicate with off-the-shelf LTE devices. Finally we present experimental results demonstrating up to 16 concurrent spatial channels for an aggregate average spectral efficiency of 59.3 bps/Hz in the downlink and 27.5 bps/Hz in the uplink, providing data rates of 200 Mbps downlink and 25 Mbps uplink in 5 MHz of TDD spectrum.Comment: IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Nov. 8-11th 2015, Pacific Grove, CA, US

Hybrid Beamforming via the Kronecker Decomposition for the Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Despite its promising performance gain, the realization of mmWave massive MIMO still faces several practical challenges. In particular, implementing massive MIMO in the digital domain requires hundreds of RF chains matching the number of antennas. Furthermore, designing these components to operate at the mmWave frequencies is challenging and costly. These motivated the recent development of hybrid-beamforming where MIMO processing is divided for separate implementation in the analog and digital domains, called the analog and digital beamforming, respectively. Analog beamforming using a phase array introduces uni-modulus constraints on the beamforming coefficients, rendering the conventional MIMO techniques unsuitable and call for new designs. In this paper, we present a systematic design framework for hybrid beamforming for multi-cell multiuser massive MIMO systems over mmWave channels characterized by sparse propagation paths. The framework relies on the decomposition of analog beamforming vectors and path observation vectors into Kronecker products of factors being uni-modulus vectors. Exploiting properties of Kronecker mixed products, different factors of the analog beamformer are designed for either nulling interference paths or coherently combining data paths. Furthermore, a channel estimation scheme is designed for enabling the proposed hybrid beamforming. The scheme estimates the AoA of data and interference paths by analog beam scanning and data-path gains by analog beam steering. The performance of the channel estimation scheme is analyzed. In particular, the AoA spectrum resulting from beam scanning, which displays the magnitude distribution of paths over the AoA range, is derived in closed-form. It is shown that the inter-cell interference level diminishes inversely with the array size, the square root of pilot sequence length and the spatial separation between paths.Comment: Submitted to IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Millimeter Wave Communications for Future Mobile Networks, minor revisio

Pilot Decontamination in CMT-based Massive MIMO Networks

Pilot contamination problem in massive MIMO networks operating in time-division duplex (TDD) mode can limit their expected capacity to a great extent. This paper addresses this problem in cosine modulated multitone (CMT) based massive MIMO networks; taking advantage of their so-called blind equalization property. We extend and apply the blind equalization technique from single antenna case to multi-cellular massive MIMO systems and show that it can remove the channel estimation errors (due to pilot contamination effect) without any need for cooperation between different cells or transmission of additional training information. Our numerical results advocate the efficacy of the proposed blind technique in improving the channel estimation accuracy and removal of the residual channel estimation errors caused by the users of the other cells.Comment: Accepted in ISWCS 201