Massive MU-MIMO Downlink TDD Systems with Linear Precoding and Downlink Pilots

We consider a massive MU-MIMO downlink time-division duplex system where a base station (BS) equipped with many antennas serves several single-antenna users in the same time-frequency resource. We assume that the BS uses linear precoding for the transmission. To reliably decode the signals transmitted from the BS, each user should have an estimate of its channel. In this work, we consider an efficient channel estimation scheme to acquire CSI at each user, called beamforming training scheme. With the beamforming training scheme, the BS precodes the pilot sequences and forwards to all users. Then, based on the received pilots, each user uses minimum mean-square error channel estimation to estimate the effective channel gains. The channel estimation overhead of this scheme does not depend on the number of BS antennas, and is only proportional to the number of users. We then derive a lower bound on the capacity for maximum-ratio transmission and zero-forcing precoding techniques which enables us to evaluate the spectral efficiency taking into account the spectral efficiency loss associated with the transmission of the downlink pilots. Comparing with previous work where each user uses only the statistical channel properties to decode the transmitted signals, we see that the proposed beamforming training scheme is preferable for moderate and low-mobility environments.Comment: Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, Oct. 201

Achieving "Massive MIMO" Spectral Efficiency with a Not-so-Large Number of Antennas

The main focus and contribution of this paper is a novel network-MIMO TDD architecture that achieves spectral efficiencies comparable with "Massive MIMO", with one order of magnitude fewer antennas per active user per cell. The proposed architecture is based on a family of network-MIMO schemes defined by small clusters of cooperating base stations, zero-forcing multiuser MIMO precoding with suitable inter-cluster interference constraints, uplink pilot signals reuse across cells, and frequency reuse. The key idea consists of partitioning the users population into geographically determined "bins", such that all users in the same bin are statistically equivalent, and use the optimal network-MIMO architecture in the family for each bin. A scheduler takes care of serving the different bins on the time-frequency slots, in order to maximize a desired network utility function that captures some desired notion of fairness. This results in a mixed-mode network-MIMO architecture, where different schemes, each of which is optimized for the served user bin, are multiplexed in time-frequency. In order to carry out the performance analysis and the optimization of the proposed architecture in a clean and computationally efficient way, we consider the large-system regime where the number of users, the number of antennas, and the channel coherence block length go to infinity with fixed ratios. The performance predicted by the large-system asymptotic analysis matches very well the finite-dimensional simulations. Overall, the system spectral efficiency obtained by the proposed architecture is similar to that achieved by "Massive MIMO", with a 10-fold reduction in the number of antennas at the base stations (roughly, from 500 to 50 antennas).Comment: Full version with appendice (proofs of theorems). A shortened version without appendice was submitted to IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun. Appendix B was revised after submissio

How Much Do Downlink Pilots Improve Cell-Free Massive MIMO?

In this paper, we analyze the benefits of including downlink pilots in a cell-free massive MIMO system. We derive an approximate per-user achievable downlink rate for conjugate beamforming processing, which takes into account both uplink and downlink channel estimation errors, and power control. A performance comparison is carried out, in terms of per-user net throughput, considering cell-free massive MIMO operation with and without downlink training, for different network densities. We take also into account the performance improvement provided by max-min fairness power control in the downlink. Numerical results show that, exploiting downlink pilots, the performance can be considerably improved in low density networks over the conventional scheme where the users rely on statistical channel knowledge only. In high density networks, performance improvements are moderate.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. IEEE Global Communications Conference 2016 (GLOBECOM). Accepte

Downlink Training in Cell-Free Massive MIMO: A Blessing in Disguise

Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system where all the access points (APs) cooperate to coherently serve all the user equipments (UEs), suppress inter-cell interference and mitigate the multiuser interference. Recent works demonstrated that, unlike co-located Massive MIMO, the \textit{channel hardening} is, in general, less pronounced in cell-free Massive MIMO, thus there is much to benefit from estimating the downlink channel. In this study, we investigate the gain introduced by the downlink beamforming training, extending the previously proposed analysis to non-orthogonal uplink and downlink pilots. Assuming single-antenna APs, conjugate beamforming and independent Rayleigh fading channel, we derive a closed-form expression for the per-user achievable downlink rate that addresses channel estimation errors and pilot contamination both at the AP and UE side. The performance evaluation includes max-min fairness power control, greedy pilot assignment methods, and a comparison between achievable rates obtained from different capacity-bounding techniques. Numerical results show that downlink beamforming training, although increases pilot overhead and introduces additional pilot contamination, improves significantly the achievable downlink rate. Even for large number of APs, it is not fully efficient for the UE relying on the statistical channel state information for data decoding.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications on August 14, 2019. {\copyright} 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other use