Cell-Free and User-Centric Massive MIMO at Millimeter Wave Frequencies

In a cell-free (CF) massive MIMO architecture a very large number of distributed access points (APs) simultaneously and jointly serves a much smaller number of mobile stations (MSs); a variant of the cell-free technique is the user-centric (UC) approach, wherein each AP just decodes a reduced set of MSs, practically the ones that are received best. This paper introduces and analyzes the CF and UC architectures at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies. First of all, a multiuser clustered channel model is introduced in order to account for the correlation among the channels of nearby users; then, an uplink multiuser channel estimation scheme is described along with low-complexity hybrid analog/digital beamforming architectures. Interestingly, in the proposed scheme no channel estimation is needed at the MSs, and the beamforming schemes used at the MSs are channel-independent and have a very simple structure. Numerical results show that the considered architectures provide good performance, especially in lightly loaded systems, with the UC approach outperforming the CF one.Comment: presented at the 28th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (IEEE PIMRC 2017), Montreal (CA), October 201

Energy Efficiency and Asymptotic Performance Evaluation of Beamforming Structures in Doubly Massive MIMO mmWave Systems

Future cellular systems based on the use of millimeter waves will heavily rely on the use of antenna arrays both at the transmitter and at the receiver. For complexity reasons and energy consumption issues, fully digital precoding and postcoding structures may turn out to be unfeasible, and thus suboptimal structures, making use of simplified hardware and a limited number of RF chains, have been investigated. This paper considers and makes a comparative assessment, both from a spectral efficiency and energy efficiency point of view, of several suboptimal precoding and postcoding beamforming structures for a cellular multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) system with large number of antennas. Analytical formulas for the asymptotic achievable spectral efficiency and for the global energy efficiency of several beamforming structures are derived in the large number of antennas regime. Using the most recently available data for the energy consumption of phase shifters and switches, we show that fully-digital beamformers may actually achieve a larger energy efficiency than lower-complexity solutions, as well as that low-complexity beam-steering purely analog beamforming may in some cases represent a good performance-complexity trade-off solution.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networkin

Subspace Tracking and Least Squares Approaches to Channel Estimation in Millimeter Wave Multiuser MIMO

The problem of MIMO channel estimation at millimeter wave frequencies, both in a single-user and in a multi-user setting, is tackled in this paper. Using a subspace approach, we develop a protocol enabling the estimation of the right (resp. left) singular vectors at the transmitter (resp. receiver) side; then, we adapt the projection approximation subspace tracking with deflation and the orthogonal Oja algorithms to our framework and obtain two channel estimation algorithms. We also present an alternative algorithm based on the least squares approach. The hybrid analog/digital nature of the beamformer is also explicitly taken into account at the algorithm design stage. In order to limit the system complexity, a fixed analog beamformer is used at both sides of the communication links. The obtained numerical results, showing the accuracy in the estimation of the channel matrix dominant singular vectors, the system achievable spectral efficiency, and the system bit-error-rate, prove that the proposed algorithms are effective, and that they compare favorably, in terms of the performance-complexity trade-off, with respect to several competing alternatives.Comment: To appear on the IEEE Transactions on Communication

Doubly Massive mmWave MIMO Systems: Using Very Large Antenna Arrays at Both Transmitter and Receiver

One of the key features of next generation wireless communication systems will be the use of frequencies in the range 10-100GHz (aka mmWave band) in densely populated indoor and outdoor scenarios. Due to the reduced wavelength, antenna arrays with a large number of antennas can be packed in very small volumes, making thus it possible to consider, at least in principle, communication links wherein not only the base-station, but also the user device, are equipped with very large antenna arrays. We denote this configuration as a "doubly-massive" MIMO wireless link. This paper introduces the concept of doubly massive MIMO systems at mmWave, showing that at mmWave the fundamentals of the massive MIMO regime are completely different from what happens at conventional sub-6 GHz cellular frequencies. It is shown for instance that the multiplexing capabilities of the channel and its rank are no longer ruled by the number of transmit and receive antennas, but rather by the number of scattering clusters in the surrounding environment. The implications of the doubly massive MIMO regime on the transceiver processing, on the system energy efficiency and on the system throughput are also discussed.Comment: Accepted for presentation at 2016 IEEE GLOBECOM, Washington (DC), USA, December 201

Downlink Power Control in User-Centric and Cell-Free Massive MIMO Wireless Networks

Recently, the so-called cell-free Massive MIMO architecture has been introduced, wherein a very large number of distributed access points (APs) simultaneously and jointly serve a much smaller number of mobile stations (MSs). A variant of the cell-free technique is the user-centric approach, wherein each AP just decodes the MSs that it receives with the largest power. This paper considers both the cell-free and user-centric approaches, and, using an interplay of sequential optimization and alternating optimization, derives downlink power-control algorithms aimed at maximizing either the minimum users' SINR (to ensure fairness), or the system sum-rate. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, as well as that the user-centric approach generally outperforms the CF one.Comment: presented at the 28th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (IEEE PIMRC 2017), Montreal (CA), October 201

Power control algorithms for CDMA networks based on large system analysis

Power control is a fundamental task accomplished in any wireless cellular network; its aim is to set the transmit power of any mobile terminal, so that each user is able to achieve its own target SINR. While conventional power control algorithms require knowledge of a number of parameters of the signal of interest and of the multiaccess interference, in this paper it is shown that in a large CDMA system much of this information can be dispensed with, and effective distributed power control algorithms may be implemented with very little information on the user of interest. An uplink CDMA system subject to flat fading is considered with a focus on the cases in which a linear MMSE receiver and a non-linear MMSE serial interference cancellation receiver are adopted; for the latter case new formulas are also given for the system SINR in the large system asymptote. Experimental results show an excellent agreement between the performance and the power profile of the proposed distributed algorithms and that of conventional ones that require much greater prior knowledge.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Nice, France, June 24 - 29, 200