Spectrum Sharing in mmWave Cellular Networks via Cell Association, Coordination, and Beamforming

This paper investigates the extent to which spectrum sharing in mmWave networks with multiple cellular operators is a viable alternative to traditional dedicated spectrum allocation. Specifically, we develop a general mathematical framework by which to characterize the performance gain that can be obtained when spectrum sharing is used, as a function of the underlying beamforming, operator coordination, bandwidth, and infrastructure sharing scenarios. The framework is based on joint beamforming and cell association optimization, with the objective of maximizing the long-term throughput of the users. Our asymptotic and non-asymptotic performance analyses reveal five key points: (1) spectrum sharing with light on-demand intra- and inter-operator coordination is feasible, especially at higher mmWave frequencies (for example, 73 GHz), (2) directional communications at the user equipment substantially alleviate the potential disadvantages of spectrum sharing (such as higher multiuser interference), (3) large numbers of antenna elements can reduce the need for coordination and simplify the implementation of spectrum sharing, (4) while inter-operator coordination can be neglected in the large-antenna regime, intra-operator coordination can still bring gains by balancing the network load, and (5) critical control signals among base stations, operators, and user equipment should be protected from the adverse effects of spectrum sharing, for example by means of exclusive resource allocation. The results of this paper, and their extensions obtained by relaxing some ideal assumptions, can provide important insights for future standardization and spectrum policy.Comment: 15 pages. To appear in IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Spectrum Sharing and Aggregation for Future Wireless Network

Energy Efficient Massive MIMO and Beamforming for 5G Communications

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been a key technique in the next generation of wireless communications for its potential to achieve higher capacity and data rates. However, the exponential growth of data traffic has led to a significant increase in the power consumption and system complexity. Therefore, we propose and study wireless technologies to improve the trade-off between system performance and power consumption of wireless communications. This Thesis firstly proposes a strategy with partial channel state information (CSI) acquisition to reduce the power consumption and hardware complexity of massive MIMO base stations. In this context, the employment of partial CSI is proposed in correlated communication channels with user mobility. By exploiting both the spatial correlation and temporal correlation of the channel, our analytical results demonstrate significant gains in the energy efficiency of the massive MIMO base station. Moreover, relay-aided communications have experienced raising interest; especially, two-way relaying systems can improve spectral efficiency with short required operating time. Therefore, this Thesis focuses on an uncorrelated massive MIMO two-way relaying system and studies power scaling laws to investigate how the transmit powers can be scaled to improve the energy efficiency up to several times the energy efficiency without power scaling while approximately maintaining the system performance. In a similar line, large antenna arrays deployed at the space-constrained relay would give rise to the spatial correlation. For this reason, this Thesis presents an incomplete CSI scheme to evaluate the trade-off between the spatial correlation and system performance. In addition, the advantages of linear processing methods and the effects of channel aging are investigated to further improve the relay-aided system performance. Similarly, large antenna arrays are required in millimeter-wave communications to achieve narrow beams with higher power gain. This poses the problem that locating the best beam direction requires high power and complexity consumption. Therefore, this Thesis presents several low-complexity beam alignment methods with respect to the state-of-the-art to evaluate the trade-off between complexity and system performance. Overall, extensive analytical and numerical results show an improved performance and validate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques

Millimeter Wave Systems for Wireless Cellular Communications

This thesis considers channel estimation and multiuser (MU) data transmission for massive MIMO systems with fully digital/hybrid structures in mmWave channels. It contains three main contributions. In this thesis, we first propose a tone-based linear search algorithm to facilitate the estimation of angle-of-arrivals of the strongest components as well as scattering components of the users at the base station (BS) with fully digital structure. Our results show that the proposed maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) based on the strongest components can achieve a higher data rate than that of the conventional MRT, under the same mean squared errors (MSE). Second, we develop a low-complexity channel estimation and beamformer/precoder design scheme for hybrid mmWave systems. In addition, the proposed scheme applies to both non-sparse and sparse mmWave channel environments. We then leverage the proposed scheme to investigate the downlink achievable rate performance. The results show that the proposed scheme obtains a considerable achievable rate of fully digital systems. Taking into account the effect of various types of errors, we investigate the achievable rate performance degradation of the considered scheme. Third, we extend our proposed scheme to a multi-cell MU mmWave MIMO network. We derive the closed-form approximation of the normalized MSE of channel estimation under pilot contamination over Rician fading channels. Furthermore, we derive a tight closed-form approximation and the scaling law of the average achievable rate. Our results unveil that channel estimation errors, the intra-cell interference, and the inter-cell interference caused by pilot contamination over Rician fading channels can be efficiently mitigated by simply increasing the number of antennas equipped at the desired BS.Comment: Thesi

A survey on hybrid beamforming techniques in 5G : architecture and system model perspectives

The increasing wireless data traffic demands have driven the need to explore suitable spectrum regions for meeting the projected requirements. In the light of this, millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has received considerable attention from the research community. Typically, in fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications is realized by the hybrid transceivers which combine high dimensional analog phase shifters and power amplifiers with lower-dimensional digital signal processing units. This hybrid beamforming design reduces the cost and power consumption which is aligned with an energy-efficient design vision of 5G. In this paper, we track the progress in hybrid beamforming for massive MIMO communications in the context of system models of the hybrid transceivers' structures, the digital and analog beamforming matrices with the possible antenna configuration scenarios and the hybrid beamforming in heterogeneous wireless networks. We extend the scope of the discussion by including resource management issues in hybrid beamforming. We explore the suitability of hybrid beamforming methods, both, existing and proposed till first quarter of 2017, and identify the exciting future challenges in this domain