Blind Estimation of Effective Downlink Channel Gains in Massive MIMO

We consider the massive MIMO downlink with time-division duplex (TDD) operation and conjugate beamforming transmission. To reliably decode the desired signals, the users need to know the effective channel gain. In this paper, we propose a blind channel estimation method which can be applied at the users and which does not require any downlink pilots. We show that our proposed scheme can substantially outperform the case where each user has only statistical channel knowledge, and that the difference in performance is particularly large in certain types of channel, most notably keyhole channels. Compared to schemes that rely on downlink pilots, our proposed scheme yields more accurate channel estimates for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios and avoid spending time-frequency resources on pilots.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 201

Hybrid Analog-Digital Precoding Revisited under Realistic RF Modeling

In this paper we revisit hybrid analog-digital precoding systems with emphasis on their modelling and radio-frequency (RF) losses, to realistically evaluate their benefits in 5G system implementations. For this, we decompose the analog beamforming networks (ABFN) as a bank of commonly used RF components and formulate realistic model constraints based on their S-parameters. Specifically, we concentrate on fully-connected ABFN (FC-ABFN) and Butler networks for implementing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in the RF domain. The results presented in this paper reveal that the performance and energy efficiency of hybrid precoding systems are severely affected, once practical factors are considered in the overall design. In this context, we also show that Butler RF networks are capable of providing better performances than FC-ABFN for systems with a large number of RF chains.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Hybrid Analog and Digital Precoding: From Practical RF System Models to Information Theoretic Bounds

Hybrid analog-digital precoding is a key millimeter wave access technology, where an antenna array with reduced number of radio frequency (RF) chains is used with an RF precoding matrix to increase antenna gain at a reasonable cost. However, digital and RF precoder algorithms must be accompa- nied by a detailed system model of the RF precoder. In this work, we provide fundamental RF system models for these precoders, and show their impact on achievable rates. We show that hybrid precoding systems suffer from significant degradation, once the limitations of RF precoding network are accounted. We subsequently quantify this performance degradation, and use it as a reference for comparing the performance of different precoding methods. These results indicate that hybrid precoders must be redesigned (and their rates recomputed) to account for practical factors.Comment: Accepted in Globecom 16 W

Beamspace Aware Adaptive Channel Estimation for Single-Carrier Time-varying Massive MIMO Channels

In this paper, the problem of sequential beam construction and adaptive channel estimation based on reduced rank (RR) Kalman filtering for frequency-selective massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems employing single-carrier (SC) in time division duplex (TDD) mode are considered. In two-stage beamforming, a new algorithm for statistical pre-beamformer design is proposed for spatially correlated time-varying wideband MIMO channels under the assumption that the channel is a stationary Gauss-Markov random process. The proposed algorithm yields a nearly optimal pre-beamformer whose beam pattern is designed sequentially with low complexity by taking the user-grouping into account, and exploiting the properties of Kalman filtering and associated prediction error covariance matrices. The resulting design, based on the second order statistical properties of the channel, generates beamspace on which the RR Kalman estimator can be realized as accurately as possible. It is observed that the adaptive channel estimation technique together with the proposed sequential beamspace construction shows remarkable robustness to the pilot interference. This comes with significant reduction in both pilot overhead and dimension of the pre-beamformer lowering both hardware complexity and power consumption.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted by IEEE ICC 2017 Wireless Communications Symposiu