9,157 research outputs found
Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays
Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or
"promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality.
Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially
deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it
into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve
unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due
to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital
Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively
complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with
fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and
mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the
Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun.
The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the
door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are
omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used
for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or
ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such
as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related
research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO,
Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive
MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin
Ubiquitous Cell-Free Massive MIMO Communications
Since the first cellular networks were trialled in the 1970s, we have
witnessed an incredible wireless revolution. From 1G to 4G, the massive traffic
growth has been managed by a combination of wider bandwidths, refined radio
interfaces, and network densification, namely increasing the number of antennas
per site. Due its cost-efficiency, the latter has contributed the most. Massive
MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a key 5G technology that uses massive
antenna arrays to provide a very high beamforming gain and spatially
multiplexing of users, and hence, increases the spectral and energy efficiency.
It constitutes a centralized solution to densify a network, and its performance
is limited by the inter-cell interference inherent in its cell-centric design.
Conversely, ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO refers to a distributed Massive
MIMO system implementing coherent user-centric transmission to overcome the
inter-cell interference limitation in cellular networks and provide additional
macro-diversity. These features, combined with the system scalability inherent
in the Massive MIMO design, distinguishes ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO
from prior coordinated distributed wireless systems. In this article, we
investigate the enormous potential of this promising technology while
addressing practical deployment issues to deal with the increased
back/front-hauling overhead deriving from the signal co-processing.Comment: Published in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and
Networking on August 5, 201
Insights and approaches for low-complexity 5G small-cell base-station design for indoor dense networks
This paper investigates low-complexity approaches to small-cell base-station (SBS) design, suitable for future 5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) indoor deployments. Using large-scale antenna systems and high-bandwidth spectrum, such SBS can theoretically achieve the anticipated future data bandwidth demand of 10000 fold in the next 20 years. We look to exploit small cell distances to simplify SBS design, particularly considering dense indoor installations. We compare theoretical results, based on a link budget analysis, with the system simulation of a densely deployed indoor network using appropriate mmWave channel propagation conditions. The frequency diverse bands of 28 and 72 GHz of the mmWave spectrum are assumed in the analysis. We investigate the performance of low-complexity approaches using a minimal number of antennas at the base station and the user equipment. Using the appropriate power consumption models and the state-of-the-art sub-component power usage, we determine the total power consumption and the energy efficiency of such systems. With mmWave being typified nonline-of-sight communication, we further investigate and propose the use of direct sequence spread spectrum as a means to overcome this, and discuss the use of multipath detection and combining as a suitable mechanism to maximize link reliability
Massive MIMO for Next Generation Wireless Systems
Multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) offers big advantages over
conventional point-to-point MIMO: it works with cheap single-antenna terminals,
a rich scattering environment is not required, and resource allocation is
simplified because every active terminal utilizes all of the time-frequency
bins. However, multi-user MIMO, as originally envisioned with roughly equal
numbers of service-antennas and terminals and frequency division duplex
operation, is not a scalable technology. Massive MIMO (also known as
"Large-Scale Antenna Systems", "Very Large MIMO", "Hyper MIMO", "Full-Dimension
MIMO" & "ARGOS") makes a clean break with current practice through the use of a
large excess of service-antennas over active terminals and time division duplex
operation. Extra antennas help by focusing energy into ever-smaller regions of
space to bring huge improvements in throughput and radiated energy efficiency.
Other benefits of massive MIMO include the extensive use of inexpensive
low-power components, reduced latency, simplification of the media access
control (MAC) layer, and robustness to intentional jamming. The anticipated
throughput depend on the propagation environment providing asymptotically
orthogonal channels to the terminals, but so far experiments have not disclosed
any limitations in this regard. While massive MIMO renders many traditional
research problems irrelevant, it uncovers entirely new problems that urgently
need attention: the challenge of making many low-cost low-precision components
that work effectively together, acquisition and synchronization for
newly-joined terminals, the exploitation of extra degrees of freedom provided
by the excess of service-antennas, reducing internal power consumption to
achieve total energy efficiency reductions, and finding new deployment
scenarios. This paper presents an overview of the massive MIMO concept and
contemporary research.Comment: Final manuscript, to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin
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