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

희소인지를 이용한 전송기술 연구

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2019. 2. 심병효.The new wave of the technology revolution, named the fifth wireless systems, is changing our daily life dramatically. These days, unprecedented services and applications such as driverless vehicles and drone-based deliveries, smart cities and factories, remote medical diagnosis and surgery, and artificial intelligence-based personalized assistants are emerging. Communication mechanisms associated with these new applications and services are way different from traditional communications in terms of latency, energy efficiency, reliability, flexibility, and connection density. Since the current radio access mechanism cannot support these diverse services and applications, a new approach to deal with these relentless changes should be introduced. This compressed sensing (CS) paradigm is very attractive alternative to the conventional information processing operations including sampling, sensing, compression, estimation, and detection. To apply the CS techniques to wireless communication systems, there are a number of things to know and also several issues to be considered. In the last decade, CS techniques have spread rapidly in many applications such as medical imaging, machine learning, radar detection, seismology, computer science, statistics, and many others. Also, various wireless communication applications exploiting the sparsity of a target signal have been studied. Notable examples include channel estimation, interference cancellation, angle estimation, spectrum sensing, and symbol detection. The distinct feature of this work, in contrast to the conventional approaches exploiting naturally acquired sparsity, is to exploit intentionally designed sparsity to improve the quality of the communication systems. In the first part of the dissertation, we study the mapping data information into the sparse signal in downlink systems. We propose an approach, called sparse vector coding (SVC), suited for the short packet transmission. In SVC, since the data information is mapped to the position of sparse vector, whole data packet can be decoded by idenitifying nonzero positions of the sparse vector. From our simulations, we show that the packet error rate of SVC outperforms the conventional channel coding schemes at the URLLC regime. Moreover, we discuss the SVC transmission for the massive MTC access by overlapping multiple SVC-based packets into the same resources. Using the spare vector overlapping and multiuser CS decoding scheme, SVC-based transmission provides robustness against the co-channel interference and also provide comparable performance than other non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes. By using the fact that SVC only identifies the support of sparse vector, we extend the SVC transmission without pilot transmission, called pilot-less SVC. Instead of using the support, we further exploit the magnitude of sparse vector for delivering additional information. This scheme is referred to as enhanced SVC. The key idea behind the proposed E-SVC transmission scheme is to transform the small information into a sparse vector and map the side-information into a magnitude of the sparse vector. Metaphorically, E-SVC can be thought as a standing a few poles to the empty table. As long as the number of poles is small enough and the measurements contains enough information to find out the marked cell positions, accurate recovery of E-SVC packet can be guaranteed. In the second part of this dissertation, we turn our attention to make sparsification of the non-sparse signal, especially for the pilot transmission and channel estimation. Unlike the conventional scheme where the pilot signal is transmitted without modification, the pilot signals are sent after the beamforming in the proposed technique. This work is motivated by the observation that the pilot overhead must scale linearly with the number of taps in CIR vector and the number of transmit antennas so that the conventional pilot transmission is not an appropriate option for the IoT devices. Primary goal of the proposed scheme is to minimize the nonzero entries of a time-domain channel vector by the help of multiple antennas at the basestation. To do so, we apply the time-domain sparse precoding, where each precoded channel propagates via fewer tap than the original channel vector. The received channel vector of beamformed pilots can be jointly estimated by the sparse recovery algorithm.5세대 무선통신 시스템의 새로운 기술 혁신은 무인 차량 및 항공기, 스마트 도시 및 공장, 원격 의료 진단 및 수술, 인공 지능 기반 맟춤형 지원과 같은 전례 없는 서비스 및 응용프로그램으로 부상하고 있다. 이러한 새로운 애플리케이션 및 서비스와 관련된 통신 방식은 대기 시간, 에너지 효율성, 신뢰성, 유연성 및 연결 밀도 측면에서 기존 통신과 매우 다르다. 현재의 무선 액세스 방식을 비롯한 종래의 접근법은 이러한 요구 사항을 만족할 수 없기 때문에 최근에 sparse processing과 같은 새로운 접근 방법이 연구되고 있다. 이 새로운 접근 방법은 표본 추출, 감지, 압축, 평가 및 탐지를 포함한 기존의 정보 처리에 대한 효율적인 대체기술로 활용되고 있다. 지난 10년 동안 compressed sensing (CS)기법은 의료영상, 기계학습, 탐지, 컴퓨터 과학, 통계 및 기타 여러 분야에서 빠르게 확산되었다. 또한, 신호의 희소성(sparsity)를 이용하는 CS 기법은 다양한 무선 통신이 연구되었다. 주목할만한 예로는 채널 추정, 간섭 제거, 각도 추정, 및 스펙트럼 감지가 있으며 현재까지 연구는 주어진 신호가 가지고 있는 본래의 희소성에 주목하였으나 본 논문에서는 기존의 접근 방법과 달리 인위적으로 설계된 희소성을 이용하여 통신 시스템의 성능을 향상시키는 방법을 제안한다. 우선 본 논문은 다운링크 전송에서 희소 신호 매핑을 통한 데이터 전송 방법을 제안하며 짧은 패킷 (short packet) 전송에 적합한 CS 접근법을 활용하는 기술을 제안한다. 제안하는 기술인 희소벡터코딩 (sparse vector coding, SVC)은 데이터 정보가 인공적인 희소벡터의 nonzero element의 위치에 매핑하여 전송된 데이터 패킷은 희소벡터의 0이 아닌 위치를 식별함으로 원신호 복원이 가능하다. 분석과 시뮬레이션을 통해 제안하는 SVC 기법의 패킷 오류률은 ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) 서비스를 지원을 위해 사용되는 채널코딩방식보다 우수한 성능을 보여준다. 또한, 본 논문은 SVC기술을 다음의 세가지 영역으로 확장하였다. 첫째로, 여러 개의 SVC 기반 패킷을 동일한 자원에 겹치게 전송함으로 상향링크에서 대규모 전송을 지원하는 방법을 제안한다. 중첩된 희소벡터를 다중사용자 CS 디코딩 방식을 사용하여 채널 간섭에 강인한 성능을 제공하고 비직교 다중 접속 (NOMA) 방식과 유사한 성능을 제공한다. 둘째로, SVC 기술이 희소 벡터의 support만을 식별한다는 사실을 이용하여 파일럿 전송이 필요없는 pilotless-SVC 전송 방법을 제안한다. 채널 정보가 없는 경우에도 희소 벡터의 support의 크기는 채널의 크기에 비례하기 때문에 pilot없이 복원이 가능하다. 셋째로, 희소벡터의 support의 크기에 추가 정보를 전송함으로 복원 성능을 향상 시키는 enhanced SVC (E-SVC)를 제안한다. 제안된 E-SVC 전송 방식의 핵심 아디디어는 짧은 패킷을 전송되는 정보를 희소 벡터로 변환하고 정보 복원을 보조하는 추가 정보를 희소 벡터의 크기 (magnitude)로 매핑하는 것이다. 마지막으로, SVC 기술을 파일럿 전송에 활용하는 방법을 제안한다. 특히, 채널 추정을 위해 채널 임펄스 응답의 신호를 희소화하는 프리코딩 기법을 제안한다. 파일럿 신호을 프로코딩 없이 전송되는 기존의 방식과 달리, 제안된 기술에서는 파일럿 신호를 빔포밍하여 전송한다. 제안된 기법은 기지국에서 다중 안테나를 활용하여 채널 응답의 0이 아닌 요소를 최소화하는 시간 영역 희소 프리코딩을 적용하였다. 이를 통해 더 적확한 채널 추정을 가능하며 더 적은 파일럿 오버헤드로 채널 추정이 가능하다.Abstract i Contents iv List of Tables viii List of Figures ix 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1.1 Three Key Services in 5G systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1.2 Sparse Processing in Wireless Communications . . . . . . . . 4 1.2 Contributions and Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.3 Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2 Sparse Vector Coding for Downlink Ultra-reliable and Low Latency Communications 12 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.2 URLLC Service Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2.2.1 Latency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2.2.2 Ultra-High Reliability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.2.3 Coexistence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.3 URLLC Physical Layer in 5G NR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.3.1 Packet Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.3.2 Frame Structure and Latency-sensitive Scheduling Schemes . 20 2.3.3 Solutions to the Coexistence Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.4 Short-sized Packet in LTE-Advanced Downlink . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 2.5 Sparse Vector Coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 2.5.1 SVC Encoding and Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 2.5.2 SVC Decoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 2.5.3 Identification of False Alarm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 2.6 SVC Performance Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 2.7 Implementation Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 2.7.1 Codebook Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 2.7.2 High-order Modulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 2.7.3 Diversity Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 2.7.4 SVC without Pilot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 2.7.5 Threshold to Prevent False Alarm Event . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 2.8 Simulations and Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 2.8.1 Simulation Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 2.8.2 Simulation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 2.9 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 3 Sparse Vector Coding for Uplink Massive Machine-type Communications 59 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 3.2 Uplink NOMA transmission for mMTC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 3.3 Sparse Vector Coding based NOMA for mMTC . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 3.3.1 System Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 3.3.2 Joint Multiuser Decoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 3.4 Simulations and Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 3.4.1 Simulation Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 3.4.2 Simulation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 3.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 4 Pilot-less Sparse Vector Coding for Short Packet Transmission 72 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 4.2 Pilot-less Sparse Vector Coding Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 4.2.1 SVC Processing with Pilot Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 4.2.2 Pilot-less SVC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 4.2.3 PL-SVC Decoding in Multiple Basestation Antennas . . . . . 78 4.3 Simulations and Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 4.3.1 Simulation Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 4.3.2 Simulation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 4.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 5 Joint Analog and Quantized Feedback via Sparse Vector Coding 84 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 5.2 System Model for Joint Spase Vector Coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 5.3 Sparse Recovery Algorithm and Performance Analysis . . . . . . . . 90 5.4 Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 5.4.1 Linear Interpolation of Sensing Information . . . . . . . . . . 96 5.4.2 Linear Combined Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 5.4.3 One-shot Packet Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 5.5 Simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 5.5.1 Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 5.5.2 Results and Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 5.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 6 Sparse Beamforming for Enhanced Mobile Broadband Communications 101 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 6.1.1 Increase the number of transmit antennas . . . . . . . . . . . 102 6.1.2 2D active antenna system (AAS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 6.1.3 3D channel environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 6.1.4 RS transmission for CSI acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 6.2 System Design and Standardization of FD-MIMO Systems . . . . . . 107 6.2.1 Deployment scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 6.2.2 Antenna configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 6.2.3 TXRU architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 6.2.4 New CSI-RS transmission strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 6.2.5 CSI feedback mechanisms for FD-MIMO systems . . . . . . 114 6.3 System Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 6.3.1 Basic System Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 6.3.2 Beamformed Pilot Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 6.4 Sparsification of Pilot Beamforming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 6.4.1 Time-domain System Model without Pilot Beamforming . . . 119 6.4.2 Pilot Beamforming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 6.5 Channel Estimation of Beamformed Pilots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 6.5.1 Recovery using Multiple Measurement Vector . . . . . . . . . 124 6.5.2 MSE Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 6.6 Simulations and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 6.6.1 Simulation Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 6.6.2 Simulation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 6.7 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 7 Conclusion 136 7.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 7.2 Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Abstract (In Korean) 152Docto

Towards Massive Machine Type Communications in Ultra-Dense Cellular IoT Networks: Current Issues and Machine Learning-Assisted Solutions

The ever-increasing number of resource-constrained Machine-Type Communication (MTC) devices is leading to the critical challenge of fulfilling diverse communication requirements in dynamic and ultra-dense wireless environments. Among different application scenarios that the upcoming 5G and beyond cellular networks are expected to support, such as eMBB, mMTC and URLLC, mMTC brings the unique technical challenge of supporting a huge number of MTC devices, which is the main focus of this paper. The related challenges include QoS provisioning, handling highly dynamic and sporadic MTC traffic, huge signalling overhead and Radio Access Network (RAN) congestion. In this regard, this paper aims to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to review recent advances, to highlight potential solutions and to propose new research directions. First, starting with an overview of mMTC features and QoS provisioning issues, we present the key enablers for mMTC in cellular networks. Along with the highlights on the inefficiency of the legacy Random Access (RA) procedure in the mMTC scenario, we then present the key features and channel access mechanisms in the emerging cellular IoT standards, namely, LTE-M and NB-IoT. Subsequently, we present a framework for the performance analysis of transmission scheduling with the QoS support along with the issues involved in short data packet transmission. Next, we provide a detailed overview of the existing and emerging solutions towards addressing RAN congestion problem, and then identify potential advantages, challenges and use cases for the applications of emerging Machine Learning (ML) techniques in ultra-dense cellular networks. Out of several ML techniques, we focus on the application of low-complexity Q-learning approach in the mMTC scenarios. Finally, we discuss some open research challenges and promising future research directions.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables, submitted for a possible future publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

D4.3 Final Report on Network-Level Solutions

Research activities in METIS reported in this document focus on proposing solutions to the network-level challenges of future wireless communication networks. Thereby, a large variety of scenarios is considered and a set of technical concepts is proposed to serve the needs envisioned for the 2020 and beyond. This document provides the final findings on several network-level aspects and groups of solutions that are considered essential for designing future 5G solutions. Specifically, it elaborates on: -Interference management and resource allocation schemes -Mobility management and robustness enhancements -Context aware approaches -D2D and V2X mechanisms -Technology components focused on clustering -Dynamic reconfiguration enablers These novel network-level technology concepts are evaluated against requirements defined by METIS for future 5G systems. Moreover, functional enablers which can support the solutions mentioned aboveare proposed. We find that the network level solutions and technology components developed during the course of METIS complement the lower layer technology components and thereby effectively contribute to meeting 5G requirements and targets.Aydin, O.; Valentin, S.; Ren, Z.; Botsov, M.; Lakshmana, TR.; Sui, Y.; Sun, W.... (2015). D4.3 Final Report on Network-Level Solutions. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/7675

Compressive Sensing-Based Grant-Free Massive Access for 6G Massive Communication

The advent of the sixth-generation (6G) of wireless communications has given rise to the necessity to connect vast quantities of heterogeneous wireless devices, which requires advanced system capabilities far beyond existing network architectures. In particular, such massive communication has been recognized as a prime driver that can empower the 6G vision of future ubiquitous connectivity, supporting Internet of Human-Machine-Things for which massive access is critical. This paper surveys the most recent advances toward massive access in both academic and industry communities, focusing primarily on the promising compressive sensing-based grant-free massive access paradigm. We first specify the limitations of existing random access schemes and reveal that the practical implementation of massive communication relies on a dramatically different random access paradigm from the current ones mainly designed for human-centric communications. Then, a compressive sensing-based grant-free massive access roadmap is presented, where the evolutions from single-antenna to large-scale antenna array-based base stations, from single-station to cooperative massive multiple-input multiple-output systems, and from unsourced to sourced random access scenarios are detailed. Finally, we discuss the key challenges and open issues to shed light on the potential future research directions of grant-free massive access.Comment: Accepted by IEEE IoT Journa