970 research outputs found
Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays
Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or
"promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality.
Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially
deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it
into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve
unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due
to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital
Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively
complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with
fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and
mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the
Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun.
The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the
door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are
omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used
for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or
ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such
as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related
research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO,
Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive
MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin
Energy-Efficient Future Wireless Networks: A Marriage between Massive MIMO and Small Cells
How would a cellular network designed for high energy efficiency look like?
To answer this fundamental question, we model cellular networks using
stochastic geometry and optimize the energy efficiency with respect to the
density of base stations, the number of antennas and users per cell, the
transmit power levels, and the pilot reuse. The highest efficiency is neither
achieved by a pure small-cell approach, nor by a pure massive MIMO solution.
Interestingly, it is the combination of these approaches that provides the
highest energy efficiency; small cells contributes by reducing the propagation
losses while massive MIMO enables multiplexing of users with controlled
interference.Comment: Published at IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless
Communications (SPAWC 2015), 5 pages, 5 figure
Massive MIMO with Non-Ideal Arbitrary Arrays: Hardware Scaling Laws and Circuit-Aware Design
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are cellular networks
where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with unconventionally many antennas,
deployed on co-located or distributed arrays. Huge spatial degrees-of-freedom
are achieved by coherent processing over these massive arrays, which provide
strong signal gains, resilience to imperfect channel knowledge, and low
interference. This comes at the price of more infrastructure; the hardware cost
and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of BS
antennas . Hence, the key to cost-efficient deployment of large arrays is
low-cost antenna branches with low circuit power, in contrast to today's
conventional expensive and power-hungry BS antenna branches. Such low-cost
transceivers are prone to hardware imperfections, but it has been conjectured
that the huge degrees-of-freedom would bring robustness to such imperfections.
We prove this claim for a generalized uplink system with multiplicative
phase-drifts, additive distortion noise, and noise amplification. Specifically,
we derive closed-form expressions for the user rates and a scaling law that
shows how fast the hardware imperfections can increase with while
maintaining high rates. The connection between this scaling law and the power
consumption of different transceiver circuits is rigorously exemplified. This
reveals that one can make the circuit power increase as , instead of
linearly, by careful circuit-aware system design.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications, 16 pages, 8 figures. The results can be reproduced using the
following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/hardware-scaling-law
Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions
Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use
of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active
terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and
addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great
capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in
energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals
from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The
complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle
to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on
system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient
implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon
technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the
bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example,
prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real
time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing
of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna
paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article
summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal
processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on
low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how
terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology
and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future
research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin
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