Hybrid Processing Design for Multipair Massive MIMO Relaying with Channel Spatial Correlation

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) avails of simple transceiver design which can tackle many drawbacks of relay systems in terms of complicated signal processing, latency, and noise amplification. However, the cost and circuit complexity of having one radio frequency (RF) chain dedicated to each antenna element are prohibitive in practice. In this paper, we address this critical issue in amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems using a hybrid analog and digital (A/D) transceiver structure. More specifically, leveraging the channel long-term properties, we design the analog beamformer which aims to minimize the channel estimation error and remain invariant over a long timescale. Then, the beamforming is completed by simple digital signal processing, i.e., maximum ratio combining/maximum ratio transmission (MRC/MRT) or zero-forcing (ZF) in the baseband domain. We present analytical bounds on the achievable spectral efficiency taking into account the spatial correlation and imperfect channel state information at the relay station. Our analytical results reveal that the hybrid A/D structure with ZF digital processor exploits spatial correlation and offers a higher spectral efficiency compared to the hybrid A/D structure with MRC/MRT scheme. Our numerical results showcase that the hybrid A/D beamforming design captures nearly 95% of the spectral efficiency of a fully digital AF relaying topology even by removing half of the RF chains. It is also shown that the hybrid A/D structure is robust to coarse quantization, and even with 2-bit resolution, the system can achieve more than 93% of the spectral efficiency offered by the same hybrid A/D topology with infinite resolution phase shifters.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Massive MIMO relaying with hybrid processing

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying is a promising technological paradigm which can offer high spectral efficiency and substantially improved coverage. Yet, these configurations face some formidable challenges in terms of digital signal processing (DSP) power consumption and circuitry complexity, since the number of radio frequency (RF) chains may scale with the number of antennas at the relay station. In this paper, we advocate that performing a portion of the power-intensive DSP in the analog domain, using simple phase shifters and with a reduced number of RF paths, can address these challenges. In particular, we consider a multipair amplify-and-forward (AF) relay system with maximum ratio combining/transmission (MRC/MRT) and we determine the asymptotic spectral efficiency for this hybrid analog/digital architecture. After that, we extend our analytical results to account for heavily quantized analog phase shifters and show that the performance loss with 2 quantization bits is only 10%

MIMO performance evaluation of isotropic, directional and highly-directional antenna systems for mm-wave communications

In this paper, we investigate how directional and highly-directional antenna systems using fixed beams can be beneficial in terms of aggregated channel and antenna gains, channel correlation and the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) capacity in both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios for single user MIMO (SU-MIMO). It is shown that narrower beams have stronger aggregated channel and antenna gain. However, narrow beamwidth triggers a higher channel correlation as fewer scatterers are seen. A possible solution to reduce the correlation among the beams is to properly decorrelate the beams in advance. To this end, we partition the area of interest and devote one specific partition to each beam to minimize the possible overlaps among the beams. Simulation results show that fixed beam SU-MIMO systems using such highly-directional beams can provide higher MIMO capacity in comparison to isotropic and directional antenna systems

MIMO performance evaluation of isotropic, directional and highly-directional antenna systems for mm-wave communications

\u3cp\u3eIn this paper, we investigate how directional and highly-directional antenna systems using fixed beams can be beneficial in terms of aggregated channel and antenna gains, channel correlation and the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) capacity in both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios for single user MIMO (SU-MIMO). It is shown that narrower beams have stronger aggregated channel and antenna gain. However, narrow beamwidth triggers a higher channel correlation as fewer scatterers are seen. A possible solution to reduce the correlation among the beams is to properly decorrelate the beams in advance. To this end, we partition the area of interest and devote one specific partition to each beam to minimize the possible overlaps among the beams. Simulation results show that fixed beam SU-MIMO systems using such highly-directional beams can provide higher MIMO capacity in comparison to isotropic and directional antenna systems.\u3c/p\u3