5 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
Joint Scheduling and ARQ for MU-MIMO Downlink in the Presence of Inter-Cell Interference
User scheduling and multiuser multi-antenna (MU-MIMO) transmission are at the
core of high rate data-oriented downlink schemes of the next-generation of
cellular systems (e.g., LTE-Advanced). Scheduling selects groups of users
according to their channels vector directions and SINR levels. However, when
scheduling is applied independently in each cell, the inter-cell interference
(ICI) power at each user receiver is not known in advance since it changes at
each new scheduling slot depending on the scheduling decisions of all
interfering base stations. In order to cope with this uncertainty, we consider
the joint operation of scheduling, MU-MIMO beamforming and Automatic Repeat
reQuest (ARQ). We develop a game-theoretic framework for this problem and build
on stochastic optimization techniques in order to find optimal scheduling and
ARQ schemes. Particularizing our framework to the case of "outage service
rates", we obtain a scheme based on adaptive variable-rate coding at the
physical layer, combined with ARQ at the Logical Link Control (ARQ-LLC). Then,
we present a novel scheme based on incremental redundancy Hybrid ARQ (HARQ)
that is able to achieve a throughput performance arbitrarily close to the
"genie-aided service rates", with no need for a genie that provides
non-causally the ICI power levels. The novel HARQ scheme is both easier to
implement and superior in performance with respect to the conventional
combination of adaptive variable-rate coding and ARQ-LLC.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, v2: small
correction