Massive MIMO Systems with Non-Ideal Hardware: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits

The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases, thus strong signal gains are achievable with little inter-user interference. Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE. Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and inter-user interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and energy-efficient antenna elements.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28 pages, 15 figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/massive-MIMO-hardware-impairment

Spectral Efficiency Analysis of Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems with Ricean Fading

This paper investigates the spectral efficiency of multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with Ricean fading that utilize the linear maximal-ratio combining detector. We firstly present closed-form expressions for the effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) with the least squares and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation methods, respectively, which apply for any number of base-station antennas $M$ and any Ricean $K$-factor. Also, the obtained results can be particularized in Rayleigh fading conditions when the Ricean $K$-factor is equal to zero. In the following, novel exact asymptotic expressions of the effective SINR are derived in the high $M$ and high Ricean $K$-factor regimes. The corresponding analysis shows that pilot contamination is removed by the MMSE estimator when we consider both infinite $M$ and infinite Ricean $K$-factor, while the pilot contamination phenomenon persists for the rest of cases. All the theoretical results are verified via Monte-Carlo simulations.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, the tenth International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP 2018), to appea