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

Decoding by Embedding: Correct Decoding Radius and DMT Optimality

The closest vector problem (CVP) and shortest (nonzero) vector problem (SVP) are the core algorithmic problems on Euclidean lattices. They are central to the applications of lattices in many problems of communications and cryptography. Kannan's \emph{embedding technique} is a powerful technique for solving the approximate CVP, yet its remarkable practical performance is not well understood. In this paper, the embedding technique is analyzed from a \emph{bounded distance decoding} (BDD) viewpoint. We present two complementary analyses of the embedding technique: We establish a reduction from BDD to Hermite SVP (via unique SVP), which can be used along with any Hermite SVP solver (including, among others, the Lenstra, Lenstra and Lov\'asz (LLL) algorithm), and show that, in the special case of LLL, it performs at least as well as Babai's nearest plane algorithm (LLL-aided SIC). The former analysis helps to explain the folklore practical observation that unique SVP is easier than standard approximate SVP. It is proven that when the LLL algorithm is employed, the embedding technique can solve the CVP provided that the noise norm is smaller than a decoding radius $\lambda_1/(2\gamma)$, where $\lambda_1$ is the minimum distance of the lattice, and $\gamma \approx O(2^{n/4})$. This substantially improves the previously best known correct decoding bound $\gamma \approx {O}(2^{n})$. Focusing on the applications of BDD to decoding of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, we also prove that BDD of the regularized lattice is optimal in terms of the diversity-multiplexing gain tradeoff (DMT), and propose practical variants of embedding decoding which require no knowledge of the minimum distance of the lattice and/or further improve the error performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Iterative receiver design for broadband wireless communication systems via expectation maximization (EM) based algorithms

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A New Approach to Linear Estimation Problem in Multi-user Massive MIMO Systems

A novel approach for solving linear estimation problem in multi-user massive MIMO systems is proposed. In this approach, the difficulty of matrix inversion is attributed to the incomplete definition of the dot product. The general definition of dot product implies that the columns of channel matrix are always orthogonal whereas, in practice, they may be not. If the latter information can be incorporated into dot product, then the unknowns can be directly computed from projections without inverting the channel matrix. By doing so, the proposed method is able to achieve an exact solution with a 25% reduction in computational complexity as compared to the QR method. Proposed method is stable, offers an extra flexibility of computing any single unknown, and can be implemented in just twelve lines of code

Low-Complexity Near-Optimal Detection Algorithms for MIMO Systems

As the number of subscribers in wireless networks and their demanding data rate are exponentially increasing, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been scaled up in the 5G where tens to hundreds of antennas are deployed at base stations (BSs). However, by scaling up the MIMO systems, designing detectors with low computational complexity and close to the optimal error performance becomes challenging. In this dissertation, we study the problem of efficient detector designs for MIMO systems. In Chapter 2, we propose efficient detection algorithms for small and moderate MIMO systems by using lattice reduction and subspace (or conditional) detection techniques. The proposed algorithms exhibit full receive diversity and approach the bit error rate (BER) of the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) solution. For quasi-static channels, the complexity of the proposed schemes is cubic in the system dimension and is only linear in the size of the QAM modulation used. However, the computational complexity of lattice reduction algorithms imposes a large burden on the proposed detectors for large MIMO systems or fast fading channels. In Chapter 3, we propose detectors for large MIMO systems based on the combination of minimum mean square error decision feedback equalization (MMSE-DFE) and subspace detection tailored to an appropriate channel ordering. Although the achieved diversity order of the proposed detectors does not necessarily equal the full receive diversity for some MIMO systems, the coding gain allows for close to ML error performance at practical values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the cost of a small computational complexity increase over the classical MMSE- DFE detection. The receive diversity deficiency is addressed by proposing another algorithm in which a partial lattice reduction (PLR) technique is deployed to improve the diversity order. Massive multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) is another technology where the BS is equipped with hundreds of antennas and serves tens of single-antenna user terminals (UTs). For the uplink of massive MIMO systems, linear detectors, such as zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE), approach the error performances of sophisticated nonlinear detectors. However, the exact solutions of ZF and MMSE involve matrix-matrix multiplication and matrix inversion operations which are expensive for massive MIMO systems. In Chapter 4, we propose efficient truncated polynomial expansion (TPE)-based detectors that achieve the error performance of the exact solutions with a computational complexity proportional to the system dimensions. The millimeter wave (mmWave) massive MIMO is another key technology for 5G cellular networks. By using hybrid beamforming techniques in which a few numbers of radio frequency (RF) chains are deployed at the BSs and the UTs, the fully-digital precoder (combiner) is approximated as a product of analog and digital precoders (combiners). In Chapter 5, we consider a signal detection scheme using the equivalent channel consisting of the precoder, mmWave channel, and combiner. The available structure in the equivalent channel enables us to achieve the BER of the optimal ML solution with a significant reduction in the computational complexity

Recursive LMMSE-Based Iterative Soft Interference Cancellation for MIMO Systems to Save Computations and Memories

Firstly, a reordered description is given for the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE)-based iterative soft interference cancellation (ISIC) detection process for Mutipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems, which is based on the equivalent channel matrix. Then the above reordered description is applied to compare the detection process for LMMSE-ISIC with that for the hard decision (HD)-based ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC) scheme, to draw the conclusion that the former is the extension of the latter. Finally, the recursive scheme for HD-OSIC with reduced complexity and memory saving is extended to propose the recursive scheme for LMMSE-ISIC, where the required computations and memories are reduced by computing the filtering bias and the estimate from the Hermitian inverse matrix and the symbol estimate vector, and updating the Hermitian inverse matrix and the symbol estimate vector efficiently. Assume N transmitters and M (no less than N) receivers in the MIMO system. Compared to the existing low-complexity LMMSE-ISIC scheme, the proposed recursive LMMSE-ISIC scheme requires no more than 1/6 computations and no more than 1/5 memory units

Wireless receiver designs: from information theory to VLSI implementation

Receiver design, especially equalizer design, in communications is a major concern in both academia and industry. It is a problem with both theoretical challenges and severe implementation hurdles. While much research has been focused on reducing complexity for optimal or near-optimal schemes, it is still common practice in industry to use simple techniques (such as linear equalization) that are generally significantly inferior. Although digital signal processing (DSP) technologies have been applied to wireless communications to enhance the throughput, the users' demands for more data and higher rate have revealed new challenges. For example, to collect the diversity and combat fading channels, in addition to the transmitter designs that enable the diversity, we also require the receiver to be able to collect the prepared diversity. Most wireless transmissions can be modeled as a linear block transmission system. Given a linear block transmission model assumption, maximum likelihood equalizers (MLEs) or near-ML decoders have been adopted at the receiver to collect diversity which is an important metric for performance, but these decoders exhibit high complexity. To reduce the decoding complexity, low-complexity equalizers, such as linear equalizers (LEs) and decision feedback equalizers (DFEs) are often adopted. These methods, however, may not utilize the diversity enabled by the transmitter and as a result have degraded performance compared to MLEs. In this dissertation, we will present efficient receiver designs that achieve low bit-error-rate (BER), high mutual information, and low decoding complexity. Our approach is to first investigate the error performance and mutual information of existing low-complexity equalizers to reveal the fundamental condition to achieve full diversity with LEs. We show that the fundamental condition for LEs to collect the same (outage) diversity as MLE is that the channels need to be constrained within a certain distance from orthogonality. The orthogonality deficiency (od) is adopted to quantify the distance of channels to orthogonality while other existing metrics are also introduced and compared. To meet the fundamental condition and achieve full diversity, a hybrid equalizer framework is proposed. The performance-complexity trade-off of hybrid equalizers is quantified by deriving the distribution of od. Another approach is to apply lattice reduction (LR) techniques to improve the ``quality' of channel matrices. We present two widely adopted LR methods in wireless communications, the Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovasz (LLL) algorithm [51] and Seysen's algorithm (SA), by providing detailed descriptions and pseudo codes. The properties of output matrices of the LLL algorithm and SA are also quantified. Furthermore, other LR algorithms are also briefly introduced. After introducing LR algorithms, we show how to adopt them into the wireless communication decoding process by presenting LR-aided hard-output detectors and LR-aided soft-output detectors for coded systems, respectively. We also analyze the performance of proposed efficient receivers from the perspective of diversity, mutual information, and complexity. We prove that LR techniques help to restore the diversity of low-complexity equalizers without increasing the complexity significantly. When it comes to practical systems and simulation tool, e.g., MATLAB, only finite bits are adopted to represent numbers. Therefore, we revisit the diversity analysis for finite-bit represented systems. We illustrate that the diversity of MLE for systems with finite-bit representation is determined by the number of non-vanishing eigenvalues. It is also shown that although theoretically LR-aided detectors collect the same diversity as MLE in the real/complex field, it may show different diversity orders when finite-bit representation exists. Finally, the VLSI implementation of the complex LLL algorithms is provided to verify the practicality of our proposed designs.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Ma, Xiaoli; Committee Member: Anderson, David; Committee Member: Barry, John; Committee Member: Chen, Xu-Yan; Committee Member: Kornegay, Kevi