Spatial Characteristics of Distortion Radiated from Antenna Arrays with Transceiver Nonlinearities

The distortion from massive MIMO (multiple-input--multiple-output) base stations with nonlinear amplifiers is studied and its radiation pattern is derived. The distortion is analyzed both in-band and out-of-band. By using an orthogonal Hermite representation of the amplified signal, the spatial cross-correlation matrix of the nonlinear distortion is obtained. It shows that, if the input signal to the amplifiers has a dominant beam, the distortion is beamformed in the same way as that beam. When there are multiple beams without any one being dominant, it is shown that the distortion is practically isotropic. The derived theory is useful to predict how the nonlinear distortion will behave, to analyze the out-of-band radiation, to do reciprocity calibration, and to schedule users in the frequency plane to minimize the effect of in-band distortion

Single-Carrier Modulation versus OFDM for Millimeter-Wave Wireless MIMO

This paper presents results on the achievable spectral efficiency and on the energy efficiency for a wireless multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) link operating at millimeter wave frequencies (mmWave) in a typical 5G scenario. Two different single-carrier modem schemes are considered, i.e., a traditional modulation scheme with linear equalization at the receiver, and a single-carrier modulation with cyclic prefix, frequency-domain equalization and FFT-based processing at the receiver; these two schemes are compared with a conventional MIMO-OFDM transceiver structure. Our analysis jointly takes into account the peculiar characteristics of MIMO channels at mmWave frequencies, the use of hybrid (analog-digital) pre-coding and post-coding beamformers, the finite cardinality of the modulation structure, and the non-linear behavior of the transmitter power amplifiers. Our results show that the best performance is achieved by single-carrier modulation with time-domain equalization, which exhibits the smallest loss due to the non-linear distortion, and whose performance can be further improved by using advanced equalization schemes. Results also confirm that performance gets severely degraded when the link length exceeds 90-100 meters and the transmit power falls below 0 dBW.Comment: accepted for publication on IEEE Transactions on Communication

Impact of Spatial Filtering on Distortion from Low-Noise Amplifiers in Massive MIMO Base Stations

In massive MIMO base stations, power consumption and cost of the low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) can be substantial because of the many antennas. We investigate the feasibility of inexpensive, power efficient LNAs, which inherently are less linear. A polynomial model is used to characterize the nonlinear LNAs and to derive the second-order statistics and spatial correlation of the distortion. We show that, with spatial matched filtering (maximum-ratio combining) at the receiver, some distortion terms combine coherently, and that the SINR of the symbol estimates therefore is limited by the linearity of the LNAs. Furthermore, it is studied how the power from a blocker in the adjacent frequency band leaks into the main band and creates distortion. The distortion term that scales cubically with the power received from the blocker has a spatial correlation that can be filtered out by spatial processing and only the coherent term that scales quadratically with the power remains. When the blocker is in free-space line-of-sight and the LNAs are identical, this quadratic term has the same spatial direction as the desired signal, and hence cannot be removed by linear receiver processing

Digital Predistortion in Large-Array Digital Beamforming Transmitters

In this article, we propose a novel digital predistortion (DPD) solution that allows to considerably reduce the complexity resulting from linearizing a set of power amplifiers (PAs) in single-user large-scale digital beamforming transmitters. In contrast to current state-of-the art solutions that assume a dedicated DPD per power amplifier, which is unfeasible in the context of large antenna arrays, the proposed solution only requires a single DPD in order to linearize an arbitrary number of power amplifiers. To this end, the proposed DPD predistorts the signal at the input of the digital precoder based on minimizing the nonlinear distortion of the combined signal at the intended receiver direction. This is a desirable feature, since the resulting emissions in other directions get partially diluted due to less coherent superposition. With this approach, only a single DPD is required, yielding great complexity and energy savings.Comment: 8 pages, Accepted for publication in Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computer

Characterizing nonlinearity in multiantenna multibeam transmitters

Abstract. In this thesis, effects of power amplifier (PA) distortion in multiantenna transmitter is studied. Input signal of each PA in the array is modelled by two or multiple tones to characterize the nonlinearity in terms of intermodulation distortion (IMD). In intermodulation, the phase of the nonlinearity depends on the phases of the corresponding input tones. Hence, in beamforming, progressive phase of the nonlinear components over the antenna elements creates a steered beam for the nonlinearity. Measurement setup is created to measure the phase and amplitude of the IMD components in the PA output. The theoretical polynomial relation of the IMD phase dependency on the input tones is validated by measurements. For flexible measurements, the setup is automatized by standard commands for programmable instruments. Second part of the thesis studies the array IMD by simulations in MATLAB. The used PA model is a memoryless polynomial fitted against the measured amplitude-to-amplitude modulation and amplitude-to-phase modulation responses of a real amplifier. The effects of nonlinearity are studied by using two tones to present each independent data stream in the PA inputs. Hence, in multibeam scenario, each data stream is modelled by two tones having individual phase and amplitude depending on the beamforming coefficients of given stream. The simulations are performed in frequency domain by utilizing the concept of spectral convolution to model the intermodulation distortion, and array factor to model the far-field radiation of the linear and nonlinear PA output components. By utilizing the simulator, PA nonlinearity is analyzed in single-beam and multi-beam scenarios by varying the steering angles, allocated stream powers and amplitude distribution over the PAs. It is observed that IMD terms which depend on only one stream are steered to same direction as the linear terms whereas the IMD terms depending on both streams spreads more in space. This has potentially positive impacts on the signal-to-distortion ratio of the streams observed in beamforming directions

DSP Linearization for Millimeter-Wave All-Digital Receiver Array with Low-Resolution ADCs

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications and cell densification are the key techniques for the future evolution of cellular systems beyond 5G. Although the current mmWave radio designs are focused on hybrid digital and analog receiver array architectures, the fully digital architecture is an appealing option due to its flexibility and support for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). In order to achieve reasonable power consumption and hardware cost, the specifications of analog circuits are expected to be compromised, including the resolution of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the linearity of radio-frequency (RF) front end. Although the state-of-the-art studies focus on the ADC, the nonlinearity can also lead to severe system performance degradation when strong input signals introduce inter-modulation distortion (IMD). The impact of RF nonlinearity becomes more severe with densely deployed mmWave cells since signal sources closer to the receiver array are more likely to occur. In this work, we design and analyze the digital IMD compensation algorithm, and study the relaxation of the required linearity in the RF-chain. We propose novel algorithms that jointly process digitized samples to recover amplifier saturation, and relies on beam space operation which reduces the computational complexity as compared to per-antenna IMD compensation.Comment: 2019 IEEE 20th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC

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

Scalable and Energy-Efficient Millimeter Massive MIMO Architectures: Reflect-Array and Transmit-Array Antennas

Hybrid analog-digital architectures are considered as promising candidates for implementing millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems since they enable a considerable reduction of the required number of costly radio frequency (RF) chains by moving some of the signal processing operations into the analog domain. However, the analog feed network, comprising RF dividers, combiners, phase shifters, and line connections, of hybrid MIMO architectures is not scalable due to its prohibitively high power consumption for large numbers of transmit antennas. Motivated by this limitation, in this paper, we study novel massive MIMO architectures, namely reflect-array (RA) and transmit-array (TA) antennas. We show that the precoders for RA and TA antennas have to meet different constraints compared to those for conventional MIMO architectures. Taking these constraints into account and exploiting the sparsity of mmWave channels, we design an efficient precoder for RA and TA antennas based on the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Furthermore, in order to fairly compare the performance of RA and TA antennas with conventional fully-digital and hybrid MIMO architectures, we develop a unified power consumption model. Our simulation results show that unlike conventional MIMO architectures, RA and TA antennas are highly energy efficient and fully scalable in terms of the number of transmit antennas.Comment: submitted to IEEE ICC 201