1,502 research outputs found
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
Deploying Dense Networks for Maximal Energy Efficiency: Small Cells Meet Massive MIMO
How would a cellular network designed for maximal energy efficiency look
like? To answer this fundamental question, tools from stochastic geometry are
used in this paper to model future cellular networks and obtain a new lower
bound on the average uplink spectral efficiency. This enables us to formulate a
tractable uplink energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem and solve it
analytically with respect to the density of base stations (BSs), the transmit
power levels, the number of BS antennas and users per cell, and the pilot reuse
factor. The closed-form expressions obtained from this general EE maximization
framework provide valuable insights on the interplay between the optimization
variables, hardware characteristics, and propagation environment. Small cells
are proved to give high EE, but the EE improvement saturates quickly with the
BS density. Interestingly, the maximal EE is achieved by also equipping the BSs
with multiple antennas and operate in a "massive MIMO" fashion, where the array
gain from coherent detection mitigates interference and the multiplexing of
many users reduces the energy cost per user.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 15
pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl
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
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