Pilot Contamination Mitigation Techniques in Massive MIMO Systems: A Precoding Approach

A massive MIMO system comprises of base stations with a very large number of antennas serving a considerably smaller number of users and providing substantial gains in spectral and energy efficiency in comparison to conventional MIMO systems. However, these benefits are limited by pilot contamination which is caused by the use of training sequences for channel estimation. This negative effect has given rise to various research works on schemes to mitigate pilot contamination and among them are precoding techniques. This thesis reviews some of the precoding techniques that mitigate pilot contamination and studies the effect of pilot contamination on the performance of massive MIMO systems through simulations. It was found that pilot contamination leads to a severe degradation of the network performance. Furthermore, as the number of antennas at the base station increases, the effect of pilot contamination is more prominent on the probability of outage and the bit error rate but this is not the case for the average sum capacity. With the average sum capacity, the effect diminishes very gradually as the antenna array at the base station grows. However, overall, the presence of pilot contamination further lowers the network performance as the number of antennas at the base station increases.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Channel estimation in massive MIMO systems

Last years were characterized by a great demand for high data throughput, good quality and spectral efficiency in wireless communication systems. Consequently, a revolution in cellular networks has been set in motion towards to 5G. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the new concepts in 5G and the idea is to scale up the known MIMO systems in unprecedented proportions, by deploying hundreds of antennas at base stations. Although, perfect channel knowledge is crucial in these systems for user and data stream separation in order to cancel interference. The most common way to estimate the channel is based on pilots. However, problems such as interference and pilot contamination (PC) can arise due to the multiplicity of channels in the wireless link. Therefore, it is crucial to define techniques for channel estimation that together with pilot contamination mitigation allow best system performance and at same time low complexity. This work introduces a low-complexity channel estimation technique based on Zadoff-Chu training sequences. In addition, different approaches were studied towards pilot contamination mitigation and low complexity schemes, with resort to iterative channel estimation methods, semi-blind subspace tracking techniques and matrix inversion substitutes. System performance simulations were performed for the several proposed techniques in order to identify the best tradeoff between complexity, spectral efficiency and system performance

INTERFERENCE MANAGEMENT IN LTE SYSTEM AND BEYOUND

The key challenges to high throughput in cellular wireless communication system are interference, mobility and bandwidth limitation. Mobility has never been a problem until recently, bandwidth has been constantly improved upon through the evolutions in cellular wireless communication system but interference has been a constant limitation to any improvement that may have resulted from such evolution. The fundamental challenge to a system designer or a researcher is how to achieve high data rate in motion (high speed) in a cellular system that is intrinsically interference-limited. Multi-antenna is the solution to data on the move and the capacity of multi-antenna system has been demonstrated to increase proportionally with increase in the number of antennas at both transmitter and receiver for point-to-point communications and multi-user environment. However, the capacity gain in both uplink and downlink is limited in a multi-user environment like cellular system by interference, the number of antennas at the base station, complexity and space constraint particularly for a mobile terminal. This challenge in the downlink provided the motivation to investigate successive interference cancellation (SIC) as an interference management tool LTE system and beyond. The Simulation revealed that ordered successive interference (OSIC) out performs non-ordered successive interference cancellation (NSIC) and the additional complexity is justified based on the associated gain in BER performance of OSIC. The major drawback of OSIC is that it is not efficient in network environment employing power control or power allocation. Additional interference management techniques will be required to fully manage the interference.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Multiple Access in Aerial Networks: From Orthogonal and Non-Orthogonal to Rate-Splitting

Recently, interest on the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has aroused. Specifically, UAVs can be used in cellular networks as aerial users for delivery, surveillance, rescue search, or as an aerial base station (aBS) for communication with ground users in remote uncovered areas or in dense environments requiring prompt high capacity. Aiming to satisfy the high requirements of wireless aerial networks, several multiple access techniques have been investigated. In particular, space-division multiple access(SDMA) and power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) present promising multiplexing gains for aerial downlink and uplink. Nevertheless, these gains are limited as they depend on the conditions of the environment. Hence, a generalized scheme has been recently proposed, called rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), which is capable of achieving better spectral efficiency gains compared to SDMA and NOMA. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of key multiple access technologies adopted for aerial networks, where aBSs are deployed to serve ground users. Since there have been only sporadic results reported on the use of RSMA in aerial systems, we aim to extend the discussion on this topic by modelling and analyzing the weighted sum-rate performance of a two-user downlink network served by an RSMA-based aBS. Finally, related open issues and future research directions are exposed.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Journa