Impact of RF mismatches on the performance of massive MIMO systems with ZF precoding

Thanks to the channel reciprocity, the time division duplex (TDD) operation is more preferred in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Avoiding the heavy feedback of downlink channel state information (CSI) from the user equipment (UE) to the base station (BS), the uplink CSI can be exploited for the downlink precoding. However, due to the mismatches of the radio frequency (RF) circuits at both sides of the link, the whole communication channels are usually not symmetric in practical systems. This paper is focused on the RF mismatches at the UEs and the BS for the multi-user massive MIMO systems with zero forcing (ZF) precoding. The closed-form expressions of the ergodic sum-rates are derived for evaluating the impact of RF mismatches on the system performance. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the RF mismatches at the UEs only lead to a negligible performance loss. However, it is imperative to perform reciprocity calibration at the BS, because the RF mismatches at the BS contribute to the inter-user interference (IUI) and result in a severe system performance degradation

An overview of transmission theory and techniques of large-scale antenna systems for 5G wireless communications

To meet the future demand for huge traffic volume of wireless data service, the research on the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication systems has been undertaken in recent years. It is expected that the spectral and energy efficiencies in 5G mobile communication systems should be ten-fold higher than the ones in the fourth generation (4G) mobile communication systems. Therefore, it is important to further exploit the potential of spatial multiplexing of multiple antennas. In the last twenty years, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna techniques have been considered as the key techniques to increase the capacity of wireless communication systems. When a large-scale antenna array (which is also called massive MIMO) is equipped in a base-station, or a large number of distributed antennas (which is also called large-scale distributed MIMO) are deployed, the spectral and energy efficiencies can be further improved by using spatial domain multiple access. This paper provides an overview of massive MIMO and large-scale distributed MIMO systems, including spectral efficiency analysis, channel state information (CSI) acquisition, wireless transmission technology, and resource allocation

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Abstract The modeling and simulation of wireless mobile communication channels is very important for the design and testing of receiver algorithms. Especially for the testing of mobile radio hardware devices, real-time implementations of such channel models are required. This work presents a low-complexity algorithm for the simulation of time-variant flat-fading channels. The new method is based on a subspace representation of the channel transfer function. We develop an algorithm to calculate the projection on this subspace in O(1) operations. By adjusting the dimension of the subspace it is possible to trade complexity for accuracy. We analyze an implementation on a digital signal processor with a 16 bit fixed-point arithmetic. The computational complexity can be reduced by one order of magnitude compared to a conventional sumof-sinusoids implementation. 1

Cooperative Space-Time Coded OFDM with Timing Errors and Carrier Frequency Offsets

Abstract—The use of distributed space-time codes in cooperative communications promises to increase the rate and reliability of data transmission. These gains were mostly demonstrated for ideal scenarios, where all the nodes are perfectly synchronized. Considering a cooperative uplink scenario with asynchronous nodes, the system suffers from two effects: timing errors and individual carrier frequency offsets. In effect, timing errors can completely cancel the advantages introduced by space-time codes, while individual carrier frequency offsets provide a great challenge to receivers. Indeed, in cooperative communications, frequency offsets are perceived as a time-variant channel, even if the individual links are static. We show that using OFDM, space-time codes (STCs) become robust to timing errors. Channel estimation and tracking takes care of frequency offsets. Our simulations demonstrate that the bit error rate (BER) performance improves by an order of magnitude, when using a cooperative system design, which takes these two effects into account. Index Terms—OFDM, Block codes, distributed space-time code, virtual MIMO, diversity methods, cooperative systems

Minimum-energy band-limited predictor with dynamic subspace selection for time-variant flat-fading channels

In this paper, we develop and analyze the basic methodology for minimum-energy (ME) band-limited prediction of sampled time-variant flat-fading channels. This predictor is based on a subspace spanned by time-concentrated and bandlimited sequences. The time-concentration of these sequences is matched to the length of the observation interval and the bandlimitation is determined by the support of the Doppler power spectral density of the fading process. Slepian showed that discrete prolate spheroidal (DPS) sequences can be used to calculate the ME band-limited continuation of a finite sequence. We utilize this property to perform channel prediction. We generalize the concept of time-concentrated and band-limited sequences to a band-limiting region consisting of disjoint intervals. For a fading process with constant spectrum over its possibly discontiguous support we prove that the ME band-limited predictor is identical to a reduced-rank maximum-likelihood predictor which is a close approximation of a Wiener predictor. In current cellular communication systems the time-selective fading process is highly oversampled. The essential dimension of the subspace spanned by time-concentrated and band-limited sequences is in the order of two to five only. The prediction error mainly depends on the support of the Doppler spectrum. We exploit this fact to propose low-complexity time-variant flat-fading channel predictors using dynamically selected predefined subspaces. The subspace selection is based on a probabilistic bound on the reconstruction error. We compare the performance of the ME band-limited predictor with a predictor based on complex exponentials. For a prediction horizon of one eights of a wavelength the numerical simulatio

Experimental evaluation of relative calibration in a MISO-TDD system

International audienceWe study the transmit time reversal beamforming in a 8x1 MISO communication system at 2.68GHz. We consider the downlink time reversal transmission where a BS communicates with one user. A prototype composed by 8 antennas and designed by Orange labs acts as the BS while the user has a single antenna. The reciprocity property is destroyed by the non-symmetric characteristics of the RF electronic circuitry. We use relative calibration which is based exclusively on signal processing techniques to solve this issue. Utilizing a controlled test setup based on OpenAirInterface, the ExpressMIMO2 SDR boards, as well as a servo controlled rail, we show the feasibility of a relative calibration method through beamforming SNR measurements. We also evaluate the performance of an antenna selection scheme at the transmit side as a low-cost low-complexity alternative to capture many of the advantages of multi-antenna systems. The measurements show that the relative calibration method is performing almost optimal and that the complexity can be significantly reduced by using antenna selection