Quantifying Potential Energy Efficiency Gain in Green Cellular Wireless Networks

Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose of providing high throughput for the user and high capacity for the service provider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, these networks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe the sources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of the studies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discuss how much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbon footprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specific sources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physical layer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. In particular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellular wireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks and point to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use base station energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reduce this inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By a consideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that an improvement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two orders of magnitude, or even more, is possible.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1210.843

Uplink Performance of Time-Reversal MRC in Massive MIMO Systems Subject to Phase Noise

Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) cellular systems with an excess of base station (BS) antennas (Massive MIMO) offer unprecedented multiplexing gains and radiated energy efficiency. Oscillator phase noise is introduced in the transmitter and receiver radio frequency chains and severely degrades the performance of communication systems. We study the effect of oscillator phase noise in frequency-selective Massive MIMO systems with imperfect channel state information (CSI). In particular, we consider two distinct operation modes, namely when the phase noise processes at the $M$ BS antennas are identical (synchronous operation) and when they are independent (non-synchronous operation). We analyze a linear and low-complexity time-reversal maximum-ratio combining (TR-MRC) reception strategy. For both operation modes we derive a lower bound on the sum-capacity and we compare their performance. Based on the derived achievable sum-rates, we show that with the proposed receive processing an $O(\sqrt{M})$ array gain is achievable. Due to the phase noise drift the estimated effective channel becomes progressively outdated. Therefore, phase noise effectively limits the length of the interval used for data transmission and the number of scheduled users. The derived achievable rates provide insights into the optimum choice of the data interval length and the number of scheduled users.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (accepted

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