747 research outputs found
Achieving "Massive MIMO" Spectral Efficiency with a Not-so-Large Number of Antennas
The main focus and contribution of this paper is a novel network-MIMO TDD
architecture that achieves spectral efficiencies comparable with "Massive
MIMO", with one order of magnitude fewer antennas per active user per cell. The
proposed architecture is based on a family of network-MIMO schemes defined by
small clusters of cooperating base stations, zero-forcing multiuser MIMO
precoding with suitable inter-cluster interference constraints, uplink pilot
signals reuse across cells, and frequency reuse. The key idea consists of
partitioning the users population into geographically determined "bins", such
that all users in the same bin are statistically equivalent, and use the
optimal network-MIMO architecture in the family for each bin. A scheduler takes
care of serving the different bins on the time-frequency slots, in order to
maximize a desired network utility function that captures some desired notion
of fairness. This results in a mixed-mode network-MIMO architecture, where
different schemes, each of which is optimized for the served user bin, are
multiplexed in time-frequency. In order to carry out the performance analysis
and the optimization of the proposed architecture in a clean and
computationally efficient way, we consider the large-system regime where the
number of users, the number of antennas, and the channel coherence block length
go to infinity with fixed ratios. The performance predicted by the large-system
asymptotic analysis matches very well the finite-dimensional simulations.
Overall, the system spectral efficiency obtained by the proposed architecture
is similar to that achieved by "Massive MIMO", with a 10-fold reduction in the
number of antennas at the base stations (roughly, from 500 to 50 antennas).Comment: Full version with appendice (proofs of theorems). A shortened version
without appendice was submitted to IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun. Appendix B
was revised after submissio
- …