On-the-fly Large-scale Channel-Gain Estimation for Massive Antenna-Array Base Stations

We propose a novel scheme for estimating the large-scale gains of the channels between user terminals (UTs) and base stations (BSs) in a cellular system. The scheme leverages TDD operation, uplink (UL) training by means of properly designed non-orthogonal pilot codes, and massive antenna arrays at the BSs. Subject to Q resource elements allocated for UL training and using the new scheme, a BS is able to estimate the large-scale channel gains of K users transmitting UL pilots in its cell and in nearby cells, provided K<=Q^2. Such knowledge of the large-scale channel gains of nearby out-of-cells users can be exploited at the BS to mitigate interference to the out-of-cell users that experience the highest levels of interference from the BS. We investigate the large-scale gain estimation performance provided by a variety of non-orthogonal pilot codebook designs. Our simulations suggest that among all the code designs considered, Grassmannian line-packing type codes yield the best large-scale channel gain estimation performance.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, and published in IEEE ICC 201

Sparse Non-Negative Recovery from Biased Subgaussian Measurements using NNLS

We investigate non-negative least squares (NNLS) for the recovery of sparse non-negative vectors from noisy linear and biased measurements. We build upon recent results from [1] showing that for matrices whose row-span intersects the positive orthant, the nullspace property (NSP) implies compressed sensing recovery guarantees for NNLS. Such results are as good as for $\ell_1$-regularized estimators but do not require tuning parameters that depend on the noise level. A bias in the sensing matrix improves this auto-regularization feature of NNLS and the NSP then determines the sparse recovery performance only. We show that NSP holds with high probability for biased subgaussian matrices and its quality is independent of the bias.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures (proofs simplified

Massive MIMO Unsourced Random Access

We consider an extension of the massive unsourced random access originally proposed by Polyanskiy to the case where the receiver has a very large number of antennas (a massive MIMO base station) and no channel state information is given to the receiver (fully non-coherent detection). Our coding approach borrows the concatenated coding idea from Amalladinne et. al., combined with a novel non-Bayesian `activity detection' algorithm for massive MIMO random access channels, that outperforms currently proposed Bayesian vector AMP (VAMP) schemes currently proposed for activity detection, and does not suffer from the numerical instabilities and requirement for accurate a priori statistics as VAMP. We show that the required transmit $E_b/N_0$ for reliable communication can be made arbitrarily small as the number of receiver antennas M grows sufficiently large

On-the-fly Uplink Training and Pilot Code Sequence Design for Cellular Networks

Cellular networks of massive MIMO base-stations employing TDD/OFDM and relying on uplink training for both downlink and uplink transmission are viewed as an attractive candidate for 5G deployments, as they promise high area spectral and energy efficiencies with relatively simple low-latency operation. We investigate the use of non-orthogonal uplink pilot designs as a means for improving the area spectral efficiency in the downlink of such massive MIMO cellular networks. We develop a class of pilot designs that are locally orthogonal within each cell, while maintaining low inner-product properties between codes in different cells. Using channel estimates provided by observations on these codes, each cell independently serves its locally active users with MU-MIMO transmission that is also designed to mitigate interference to a subset of `strongly interfered' out-of-cell users. As our simulation-based analysis shows, such cellular operation based on the proposed codes yields user-rate CDF improvement with respect to conventional operation, which can be exploited to improve cell and/or cell-throughput performance.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

A New Scaling Law for Activity Detection in Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we study the problem of \textit{activity detection} (AD) in a massive MIMO setup, where the Base Station (BS) has $M \gg 1$ antennas. We consider a block fading channel model where the $M$-dim channel vector of each user remains almost constant over a \textit{coherence block} (CB) containing $D_c$ signal dimensions. We study a setting in which the number of potential users $K_c$ assigned to a specific CB is much larger than the dimension of the CB $D_c$ ($K_c \gg D_c$) but at each time slot only $A_c \ll K_c$ of them are active. Most of the previous results, based on compressed sensing, require that $A_c\le D_c$, which is a bottleneck in massive deployment scenarios such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. In this paper, we show that one can overcome this fundamental limitation when the number of BS antennas $M$ is sufficiently large. More specifically, we derive a \textit{scaling law} on the parameters $(M, D_c, K_c, A_c)$ and also \textit{Signal-to-Noise Ratio} (SNR) under which our proposed AD scheme succeeds. Our analysis indicates that with a CB of dimension $D_c$, and a sufficient number of BS antennas $M$ with $A_c/M=o(1)$, one can identify the activity of $A_c=O(D_c^2/\log^2(\frac{K_c}{A_c}))$ active users, which is much larger than the previous bound $A_c=O(D_c)$ obtained via traditional compressed sensing techniques. In particular, in our proposed scheme one needs to pay only a poly-logarithmic penalty $O(\log^2(\frac{K_c}{A_c}))$ for increasing the number of potential users $K_c$, which makes it ideally suited for AD in IoT setups. We propose low-complexity algorithms for AD and provide numerical simulations to illustrate our results. We also compare the performance of our proposed AD algorithms with that of other competitive algorithms in the literature.Comment: 11 pages, 3 Figure

Non-Bayesian Activity Detection, Large-Scale Fading Coefficient Estimation, and Unsourced Random Access with a Massive MIMO Receiver

In this paper, we study the problem of user activity detection and large-scale fading coefficient estimation in a random access wireless uplink with a massive MIMO base station with a large number $M$ of antennas and a large number of wireless single-antenna devices (users). We consider a block fading channel model where the $M$-dimensional channel vector of each user remains constant over a coherence block containing $L$ signal dimensions in time-frequency. In the considered setting, the number of potential users $K_\text{tot}$ is much larger than $L$ but at each time slot only $K_a<<K_\text{tot}$ of them are active. Previous results, based on compressed sensing, require that $K_a\leq L$, which is a bottleneck in massive deployment scenarios such as Internet-of-Things and unsourced random access. In this work we show that such limitation can be overcome when the number of base station antennas $M$ is sufficiently large. We also provide two algorithms. One is based on Non-Negative Least-Squares, for which the above scaling result can be rigorously proved. The other consists of a low-complexity iterative componentwise minimization of the likelihood function of the underlying problem. Finally, we use the discussed approximated ML algorithm as the decoder for the inner code in a concatenated coding scheme for unsourced random access, a grant-free uncoordinated multiple access scheme where all users make use of the same codebook, and the massive MIMO base station must come up with the list of transmitted messages irrespectively of the identity of the transmitters. We show that reliable communication is possible at any $E_b/N_0$ provided that a sufficiently large number of base station antennas is used, and that a sum spectral efficiency in the order of $\mathcal{O}(L\log(L))$ is achievable.Comment: 58 pages, 9 figures, added references, minor corrections and edits, extended section