Random Access Protocols for Massive MIMO

5G wireless networks are expected to support new services with stringent requirements on data rates, latency and reliability. One novel feature is the ability to serve a dense crowd of devices, calling for radically new ways of accessing the network. This is the case in machine-type communications, but also in urban environments and hotspots. In those use cases, the high number of devices and the relatively short channel coherence interval do not allow per-device allocation of orthogonal pilot sequences. This article motivates the need for random access by the devices to pilot sequences used for channel estimation, and shows that Massive MIMO is a main enabler to achieve fast access with high data rates, and delay-tolerant access with different data rate levels. Three pilot access protocols along with data transmission protocols are described, fulfilling different requirements of 5G services

Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity

Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging 5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-of-Things (IoT) is still a developing topic, as IoT connectivity has requirements and constraints that are significantly different from the broadband connections. In this paper we investigate the applicability of massive MIMO to IoT connectivity. Specifically, we treat the two generic types of IoT connections envisioned in 5G: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). This paper fills this important gap by identifying the opportunities and challenges in exploiting massive MIMO for IoT connectivity. We provide insights into the trade-offs that emerge when massive MIMO is applied to mMTC or URLLC and present a number of suitable communication schemes. The discussion continues to the questions of network slicing of the wireless resources and the use of massive MIMO to simultaneously support IoT connections with very heterogeneous requirements. The main conclusion is that massive MIMO can bring benefits to the scenarios with IoT connectivity, but it requires tight integration of the physical-layer techniques with the protocol design.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Capacity-Achieving Iterative LMMSE Detection for MIMO-NOMA Systems

This paper considers a iterative Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE) detection for the uplink Multiuser Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) systems with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). The iterative LMMSE detection greatly reduces the system computational complexity by departing the overall processing into many low-complexity distributed calculations. However, it is generally considered to be sub-optimal and achieves relatively poor performance. In this paper, we firstly present the matching conditions and area theorems for the iterative detection of the MIMO-NOMA systems. Based on the proposed matching conditions and area theorems, the achievable rate region of the iterative LMMSE detection is analysed. We prove that by properly design the iterative LMMSE detection, it can achieve (i) the optimal sum capacity of MU-MIMO systems, (ii) all the maximal extreme points in the capacity region of MU-MIMO system, and (iii) the whole capacity region of two-user MIMO systems.Comment: 6pages, 5 figures, accepted by IEEE ICC 2016, 23-27 May 2016, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysi