High Efficiency Beam Alignment Based on Multi-Modal Beam Patterns for Massive MIMO Antenna Systems

Millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system is expected to achieve enormous transmission rate, provided that the transmit and receive beams are properly aligned with the MIMO channel. However, existing beam alignment techniques rely on either channel estimation or beam sweeping, which incur prohibitively high training overhead, especially for future wireless systems with further increased antenna dimensions and more stringent requirement on cost-effective hardware architectures. In this paper, we propose a new beam alignment technique, which is environment-aware and training-free, by utilizing the emerging concept of channel knowledge map (CKM), together with the user location information that is readily available in contemporary wireless systems. CKM is a site-specific database, tagged with the transmitter/receiver locations, which contains useful channel information to facilitate or even obviate real-time channel state information (CSI) acquistion. Two instances of CKM are proposed for beam alignment in mmWave massive MIMO systems, namely channel path map (CPM) and beam index map (BIM). It is shown that compared with existing training-based beam alignment schemes, the proposed CKM-enabled environment-aware beam alignment is able to drastically improve the effective communication rate, even with moderate user location errors, thanks to its significant saving of the prohibitive training over-head.

As a combination of spatial modulation (SM) system and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, massive SM aided MIMO (SM-MIMO) system is recently proposed. In broadband scenarios, single-carrier (SC) modulation is introduced to massive SM-MIMO system, thus massive SC-SM MIMO system is proposed for uplink multi-user transmission over frequency-selective fading channels. In this study, the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of multi-cell massive SC-SM MIMO system is analysed, meanwhile the pilot contamination effect is taken into consideration. A tight SE lower bound of multi-cell massive SC-SM MIMO system is proposed with maximum ratio (MR) combining, which also takes into account the imperfect channel estimation, transmit antenna correlation and path loss. The tightness of the authors' proposed closed-form SE lower bound is shown via simulation results. The optimal pilot reuse factor can be determined with different system configurations by simulations, and the pilot reuse factor that is larger than one is more suitable for less TAs and user equipments.

A new graph modulation scheme is proposed for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with a large number of transmit antennas. Each data symbol is transmitted in the form of multiple weighted replicas. The replicas from different symbols are multiplexed onto a two-dimensional (2D) space-time grid, which is formed by multiple transmit antennas in the space domain and different transmission instants in the time domain. Multiplexing repeated symbols onto a 2D space-time grid achieves performance gains in terms of both diversity gain and high degree-of-freedom of the received signals. In addition, it enables a bipartite graph representation of the system, with one set of nodes being the transmitted symbols and the other set containing the received space-time samples. A modified message passing algorithm is proposed to iteratively detect the transmitted symbols by exploiting the structure of the bipartite graph. The proposed graph modulation scheme can flexibly adjust the tradeoff among energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, space diversity, and detection complexity by choosing different design parameters based on application requirements. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve significant performance gains over the conventional spatial multiplexing scheme used in MIMO systems.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology for wireless communication is considered a key technology for the future fifth-generation (5G) communication networks. To reduce the propagation loss of channel, MIMO systems with analog or digital hybrid precoders and combiners (HPC) architecture have been used. This review paper presents the various types of analog and digital HPC designs for the massive MIMO communication systems that were investigated within the last decade. The reviewed systems are useful for both single-user (SU) and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. The key parameter of the study was spectral efficiency (SE), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), signal-to-interference pulse noise ratio (SINR), system sum-rate (SR) performance, computational complexity (CC), co-channel interference (CCI), inter-primary base station interference (IPBSI), multiuser interference (MUI), effective desired channel gain (EDCG), and minimum mean square error (MMSE).

The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system can either be massive or conventional “small-scale” ones. It has been verified that the massive MIMO technology has a great potential to improve transmission range, spectral efficiency, and coverage compared to conventional MIMO. For realistic antenna configurations systems, there is an increase in the computational complexity associated with signal detection in massive MIMO systems. Several theoretical iterative techniques have been proposed to balance the computational complexity and performance in massive MIMO systems. However, most of these methods have very slow convergence rate. Therefore, we employ the multiple search direction conjugate gradient (MSD-CG) method in massive MIMO uplink systems to reduce the data detection complexity and enhance the performance. The efficiency of the proposed method has been improved by a projection technique that requires a search direction in each sub-domain rather than forming all search directions conjugate to each other. In this paper, we compare the proposed approach to the approximate and exact methods. Our results indicate that the proposed algorithm with realistic antenna configurations is superior to the existing methods for large-scale MIMO systems.

Visible light communication (VLC) building on the existing illumination infrastructure utilizes light emitting diode (LED) luminaries as wireless transmitters. To achieve data rates on the order of gigabits per second in VLC systems, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission has been identified as a key technology. In this paper, we consider a centralized network architecture where the ceiling LED luminaries act as transmitter elements of a distributed massive MIMO VLC system. To obtain the full benefits of massive MIMO, channel state information must be available at the transmitter side. Downlink (DL) channel estimation in a massive MIMO system requires huge pilot overhead in DL as well as feedback overhead in uplink. This makes the implementation of massive MIMO system infeasible if not properly designed. In our study, we address the design of massive MIMO VLC systems with a limited number of DL pilot signals. We explore different DL pilot patterns (PPs) in frequency, time, and spatial domains where interpolation is performed to obtain the global channel matrix taking advantage of the indoor environment geometry and layout of luminaries. We then present data rate results for different DL PPs under the consideration of varying number of active user equipments through Monte-Carlo simulations.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is a key technology of 5G communications and a research focus of 6G communications in the future. It can be widely used in communication, radar, power and transmission systems. In the mmWave MIMO system, hybrid beamforming (HBF) is regarded as a potentially promising technology, because it keeps a good balance between hardware complexity and system performance. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid beamforming scheme for the multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) scenario. We first design the analog beamforming by trying to avoid the loss of information to maximize the sum-rate of the communication system. Then based on the idea of successive interference cancellation (SIC), we develop the successive block diagonalization (SBD) method to eliminate interference between two adjacent users, which can avoid the computation caused by the influence between users that are far apart. Unlike the baseband BD technology, the proposed scheme has low complexity. The simulation results are shown to validate the proposed scheme.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are expected to achieve substantial gains in frequency efficiency compared to conventional MIMO systems. However, these promising gains are limited by the pilot contamination in multicell scenario, which results from reusing the same set of pilot sequences in neighboring cells. This paper proposes a clustering based pilot allocation (CPA) algorithm to mitigate the effects of pilot contamination. Specifically, we first define the inter-cell interference (ICI) relationship between users, based on which the users are divided into high and low ICI groups. Then, the users in low ICI group reuse pilots randomly, while the users in high ICI group are clustered by affinity propagation (AP) clustering method. Finally, we perform different pilot allocation strategies according to the types of user clusters. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the pilot efficiency compared to the existing pilot allocation algorithms using grouping ideas.

Minimum mean square error hometd has proved its superiority for signal detection in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems for its near-optimal performance. However, the detection efficiency is restrained by a high computation complexity and low parallelism operation of matrix inversion. This paper presented a hardware efficient signal detector based on low complexity Lanczos Method, which replaced the matrix inversion with a series iterations of linear equation and reduce the computational complexity form O(N T 3) to O(N T 2) where N T denotes the number of users. According to the algorithm, a signal detector for 128×8 MIMO system is designed and implemented using TSMC 65nm CMOS technology. The results are 0.441 Mbps/mW (throughput/power) and 206.55 Mbps/mm2 (throughput/area), which are increased by 2.4× and 1.82× that of recently proposed Neumman method.

Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and massive multiple-input-multiple-output technologies appear as key enablers in future emerging wireless communication systems. Propagation in mm-wave communications is well described by geometric channel models, where a clear relation between communication and positioning arises. On one hand, initial access, a procedure that precedes high data rate transmission and consists of beam selection and alignment between two devices, can benefit from position information. On the other hand, accurate positioning relies on high-quality communication links with proper beam alignment. This work analyzes the interplay between communication and positioning, proposes a new in-band position-aided beam selection protocol considering scenarios with line-of-sight and reflected paths, and possible beam alignment errors. Simulation results show significant reductions in latency with respect to standard beam selection protocols.

The massive MIMO systems are the more popular field in the present era for the 5G wireless communication system. The MIMO system is a demanding research topic for the last four decades. This topic is under implementation and observation from the last few years. These systems have many advantages and many research sub-areas but this paper investigates the modified model of the massive MIMO receiver system. The traditional receiver system model of massive MIMO system reduces the channel noise using a linear filter in the receive combiner bank (RCB) but the proposed model removes the channel noise before the RCB using an adaptive filter bank (AFB). The AFB is the combination of LMS adaptive filters. The analysis parameters are channel noise, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and bit-error-rate (BER) using the hybrid precoder and combiner computation algorithms – Quantized Sparse Hybrid Beamforming (QSHB) and Hybrid Beamforming Peak Search (HBPS). Therefore, the proposed massive MIMO system model gives the less channel noise in the received signal, higher SNR and lower BER as compared to the traditional massive MIMO receiver systems.

In this paper, we propose a novel statistical beamforming (SBF) method called the partial-nulling-based SBF (PN-SBF) to serve a number of users that are undergoing distinct degrees of spatial channel correlations in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We consider a massive MIMO system with two user groups. The first group experiences a low spatial channel correlation, whereas the second group has a high spatial channel correlation, which can happen in massive MIMO systems that are based on fifth-generation networks. By analyzing the statistical signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, it can be observed that the statistical beamforming vector for the low-correlation group should be designed as the orthogonal complement for the space spanned by the aggregated channel covariance matrices of the high-correlation group. Meanwhile, the spatial degrees of freedom for the high-correlation group should be preserved without cancelling the interference to the low-correlation group. Accordingly, a group-common pre-beamforming matrix is applied to the low-correlation group to cancel the interference to the high-correlation group. In addition, to deal with the intra-group interference in each group, the post-beamforming vector for each group is designed in the manner of maximizing the signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio, which yields additional performance improvements for the PN-SBF. The simulation results verify that the proposed PN-SBF outperforms the conventional SBF schemes in terms of the ergodic sum rate for the massive MIMO systems with distinct spatial correlations, without the rate ceiling effect in the high signal-to-noise ratio region unlike conventional SBF schemes.

In this paper, we provide an effective multiuser transmission scheme in three-dimensional (3D) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cellular systems, where the full-duplex (FD) base station (BS) equips two separate large-scale uniform planar antenna array (UPA). In order to reduce the computational and implementation complexity, we investigate the characteristic of the beam-domain (BD) 3D massive MIMO channels and self-interference (SI) channel. We propose the 3D multiuser beamspace transmission (MUBT) scheme that requires the spatial angular information of the users and the SI channel. We show that, due to the reduced dimension property of the effective beamspace channel, the overhead for channel estimation is reduced. Furthermore, a user scheduling algorithm is proposed to enable the 3D MUBT scheme in the FD systems. Finally, both the theoretical analysis and simulation results show the the SI can be effectively reduced and demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed 3D MUBT scheme on spectral efficiency compared with the conventional half-duplex (HD) and FD transmission schemes.

This paper studies the downlink sum-rate and energy efficiency (EE) of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems under the effect of channel aging caused by the movements of users. First, a closed-form expression of the downlink sum-rate where zero-forcing (ZF) precoder is adopted at the base station (BS) is derived. Based on the expression, the power-scaling law that when the number of BS antennas M approaches to infinity, the transmit power of BS can be reduced proportionally to 1/√M is still satisfied in the massive MIMO downlink system. Second, we utilize a general power consumption model to analyze the EE of the system. Both theoretical analysis and Monte-Carlo simulations show that the emergence of channel aging could degrade the sum-rate and the EE of the system.

The performance of the hybrid beamforming system based on the full-connected structure is close to that of the full-digital one in millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, due to the high complexity of circuit wiring in practical applications, it has been greatly restricted. This paper investigates the hybrid (analog/digital) beamforming design of a multiuser mmWave massive MIMO system with sub-connected structure. For this system, we focus on a sum-rate maximization probelm. Considering the joint design of the receiver, and transmitter, a two-stage design method is adopted. In the analog stage, the analog beamformer, and combiner are designed by the proposed piecewise dual joint iterative approximation (PDJIA) method, which not only can obtain closed-form solutions but also has linear property. Based on the criterion of avoiding the loss of information, the problem of digital beamforming is solved by exploiting the baseband piecewise successive approximation (BPSA) method, which can effectively increase the number of users served. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the art MIMO hybrid beamforming design schemes, and more accurately approximates to that of the full-digital system.