1,906 research outputs found
AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing
The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for
higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of
more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the
increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density
increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are
connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna
access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of
data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while
enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be
possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being
the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated
access points.
In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time
but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full
spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using
a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter
which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital
circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed,
comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to
achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to
nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC
and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our
knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO
gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly
with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per
client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin
Receive Combining vs. Multi-Stream Multiplexing in Downlink Systems with Multi-Antenna Users
In downlink multi-antenna systems with many users, the multiplexing gain is
strictly limited by the number of transmit antennas and the use of these
antennas. Assuming that the total number of receive antennas at the
multi-antenna users is much larger than , the maximal multiplexing gain can
be achieved with many different transmission/reception strategies. For example,
the excess number of receive antennas can be utilized to schedule users with
effective channels that are near-orthogonal, for multi-stream multiplexing to
users with well-conditioned channels, and/or to enable interference-aware
receive combining. In this paper, we try to answer the question if the data
streams should be divided among few users (many streams per user) or many users
(few streams per user, enabling receive combining). Analytic results are
derived to show how user selection, spatial correlation, heterogeneous user
conditions, and imperfect channel acquisition (quantization or estimation
errors) affect the performance when sending the maximal number of streams or
one stream per scheduled user---the two extremes in data stream allocation.
While contradicting observations on this topic have been reported in prior
works, we show that selecting many users and allocating one stream per user
(i.e., exploiting receive combining) is the best candidate under realistic
conditions. This is explained by the provably stronger resilience towards
spatial correlation and the larger benefit from multi-user diversity. This
fundamental result has positive implications for the design of downlink systems
as it reduces the hardware requirements at the user devices and simplifies the
throughput optimization.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 16 pages, 11
figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code:
https://github.com/emilbjornson/one-or-multiple-stream
On the Throughput of Large-but-Finite MIMO Networks using Schedulers
This paper studies the sum throughput of the {multi-user}
multiple-input-single-output (MISO) networks in the cases with large but finite
number of transmit antennas and users. Considering continuous and bursty
communication scenarios with different users' data request probabilities, we
derive quasi-closed-form expressions for the maximum achievable throughput of
the networks using optimal schedulers. The results are obtained in various
cases with different levels of interference cancellation. Also, we develop an
efficient scheduling scheme using genetic algorithms (GAs), and evaluate the
effect of different parameters, such as channel/precoding models, number of
antennas/users, scheduling costs and power amplifiers' efficiency, on the
system performance. Finally, we use the recent results on the achievable rates
of finite block-length codes to analyze the system performance in the cases
with short packets. As demonstrated, the proposed GA-based scheduler reaches
(almost) the same throughput as in the exhaustive search-based optimal
scheduler, with substantially less implementation complexity. Moreover, the
power amplifiers' inefficiency and the scheduling delay affect the performance
of the scheduling-based systems significantly
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