286 research outputs found
AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing
The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for
higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of
more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the
increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density
increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are
connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna
access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of
data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while
enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be
possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being
the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated
access points.
In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time
but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full
spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using
a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter
which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital
circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed,
comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to
achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to
nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC
and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our
knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO
gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly
with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per
client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin
Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions
Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use
of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active
terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and
addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great
capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in
energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals
from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The
complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle
to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on
system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient
implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon
technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the
bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example,
prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real
time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing
of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna
paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article
summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal
processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on
low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how
terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology
and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future
research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on 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
Reciprocity Calibration for Massive MIMO: Proposal, Modeling and Validation
This paper presents a mutual coupling based calibration method for
time-division-duplex massive MIMO systems, which enables downlink precoding
based on uplink channel estimates. The entire calibration procedure is carried
out solely at the base station (BS) side by sounding all BS antenna pairs. An
Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is derived, which processes the
measured channels in order to estimate calibration coefficients. The EM
algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art narrow-band calibration schemes
in a mean squared error (MSE) and sum-rate capacity sense. Like its
predecessors, the EM algorithm is general in the sense that it is not only
suitable to calibrate a co-located massive MIMO BS, but also very suitable for
calibrating multiple BSs in distributed MIMO systems.
The proposed method is validated with experimental evidence obtained from a
massive MIMO testbed. In addition, we address the estimated narrow-band
calibration coefficients as a stochastic process across frequency, and study
the subspace of this process based on measurement data. With the insights of
this study, we propose an estimator which exploits the structure of the process
in order to reduce the calibration error across frequency. A model for the
calibration error is also proposed based on the asymptotic properties of the
estimator, and is validated with measurement results.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications,
21/Feb/201
System capacity enhancement for 5G network and beyond
A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe demand for wireless digital data is dramatically increasing year over year. Wireless communication systems like Laptops, Smart phones, Tablets, Smart watch, Virtual Reality devices and so on are becoming an important part of people’s daily life. The number of mobile devices is increasing at a very fast speed as well as the requirements for mobile devices such as super high-resolution image/video, fast download speed, very short latency and high reliability, which raise challenges to the existing wireless communication networks. Unlike the previous four generation communication networks, the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication network includes many technologies such as millimetre-wave communication, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), visual light communication (VLC), heterogeneous network (HetNet) and so forth. Although 5G has not been standardised yet, these above technologies have been studied in both academia and industry and the goal of the research is to enhance and improve the system capacity for 5G networks and beyond by studying some key problems and providing some effective solutions existing in the above technologies from system implementation and hardware impairments’ perspective.
The key problems studied in this thesis include interference cancellation in HetNet, impairments calibration for massive MIMO, channel state estimation for VLC, and low latency parallel Turbo decoding technique. Firstly, inter-cell interference in HetNet is studied and a cell specific reference signal (CRS) interference cancellation method is proposed to mitigate the performance degrade in enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC). This method takes carrier frequency offset (CFO) and timing offset (TO) of the user’s received signal into account. By reconstructing the interfering signal and cancelling it afterwards, the capacity of HetNet is enhanced.
Secondly, for massive MIMO systems, the radio frequency (RF) impairments of the hardware will degrade the beamforming performance. When operated in time duplex division (TDD) mode, a massive MIMO system relies on the reciprocity of the channel which can be broken by the transmitter and receiver RF impairments. Impairments calibration has been studied and a closed-loop reciprocity calibration method is proposed in this thesis. A test device (TD) is introduced in this calibration method that can estimate the transmitters’ impairments over-the-air and feed the results back to the base station via the Internet. The uplink pilots sent by the TD can assist the BS receivers’ impairment estimation. With both the uplink and downlink impairments estimates, the reciprocity calibration coefficients can be obtained. By computer simulation and lab experiment, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated.
Channel coding is an essential part of a wireless communication system which helps fight with noise and get correct information delivery. Turbo codes is one of the most reliable codes that has been used in many standards such as WiMAX and LTE. However, the decoding process of turbo codes is time-consuming and the decoding latency should be improved to meet the requirement of the future network. A reverse interleave address generator is proposed that can reduce the decoding time and a low latency parallel turbo decoder has been implemented on a FPGA platform. The simulation and experiment results prove the effectiveness of the address generator and show that there is a trade-off between latency and throughput with a limited hardware resource.
Apart from the above contributions, this thesis also investigated multi-user precoding for MIMO VLC systems. As a green and secure technology, VLC is achieving more and more attention and could become a part of 5G network especially for indoor communication. For indoor scenario, the MIMO VLC channel could be easily ill-conditioned. Hence, it is important to study the impact of the channel state to the precoding performance. A channel state estimation method is proposed based on the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the users’ received signal. Simulation results show that it can enhance the capacity of the indoor MIMO VLC system
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
A Concise Review of 5G New Radio Capabilities for Directional Access at mmWave Frequencies
In this work, we briefly outline the core 5G air interface improvements
introduced by the latest New Radio (NR) specifications, as well as elaborate on
the unique features of initial access in 5G NR with a particular emphasis on
millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency range. The highly directional nature of 5G
mmWave cellular systems poses a variety of fundamental differences and research
problem formulations, and a holistic understanding of the key system design
principles behind the 5G NR is essential. Here, we condense the relevant
information collected from a wide diversity of 5G NR standardization documents
(based on 3GPP Release 15) to distill the essentials of directional access in
5G mmWave cellular, which becomes the foundation for any corresponding
system-level analysis.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, published in proceedings of
International Conference on Next Generation Wired/Wireless Networking, NEW2AN
2018, St. Petersburg, Russi
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