Spectral Efficiency Improvement in Massive MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are a main enabler of the excessive throughput requirements in 5G and future generation wireless networks as they can serve many users simultaneously with high spectral and energy efficiency. To achieve this massive MIMO systems require accurate and timely channel state information (CSI), which is acquired by a training process that involves pilot transmission, CSI estimation, and feedback. This training process incurs a training overhead, which scales with the number of antennas, users, and subcarriers. Reducing the training overhead in massive MIMO systems has been a major topic of research since the emergence of the concept. Recently, deep learning (DL)-based approaches have been proposed and shown to provide significant reduction in the CSI acquisition and feedback overhead in massive MIMO systems compared to traditional techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the state-of-the-art DL architectures and algorithms used for CSI acquisition and feedback, and provide further research directions.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been drawing considerable interest. In the uplink, massive MIMO systems are commonly studied assuming that each base station (BS) decodes the signals of its user terminals separately and linearly while treating all interference as noise. Although this approach provides improved spectral efficiency (SE) in favorable channel conditions, it is generally sub-optimal from an information-theoretic perspective. In this work we characterize the SE of massive MIMO when the BSs are allowed to jointly decode the received signals. We consider two schemes for handling the interference, and derive their SEs for both finite and asymptotic number of antennas. Simulation tests of the proposed methods illustrate their gains in SE compared to standard separate linear decoding, and show that the standard approach fails to capture the actual achievable rates of massive MIMO systems, particularly when the interference is dominant.

The base station (BS) density influences the coverage performance of cellular communication system. In massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system, each BS is equipped with large scale antenna array. The stochastic geometric model is employed because of its analytical tractability. This paper demonstrates that BS density has to be below a certain bound in order to satisfy the coverage requirement in massive MIMO system. Closed-form expression for the BS density bounded by maximum outage probability is derived using Lambert W function. Moreover, the expression for the upper bound of successful area spectral efficiency (ASE) is also derived. Our study claims that increasing BS density will lead to the deterioration of coverage performance in massive MIMO system.

Recently, massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) is considered as a promising technology to significantly improve the spectral and energy efficiency of fifth generation (5G) networks. Massive MIMO increases the energy efficiency (EE) by three orders of magnitude as compared to single antenna systems. In this paper, we review and analyze energy efficient resource allocation techniques for massive MIMO system. To this end, the energy efficiency of massive massive MIMO with linear processing is formulated. Analytical formulation is provided for the spectral efficiency (SE) and total system power consumption model. The tradeoff on the spectral and energy efficiency is analyzed. The impacts of propagation and system parameters on the SE-EE tradeoff are investigated. Then, large scale fading based analytical approximation for the energy efficiency is formulated. Finally, numerical simulation is done to validate the theoretical analysis.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the most promising techniques for next generation wireless communications due to its superior capability to provide high spectrum and energy efficiency. Considering the very large number of antennas employed at the base station, however, the pilot overhead for downlink channel estimation becomes unaffordable in frequency division duplex (FDD) multiuser massive MIMO systems. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic metric to design the pilot for downlink channel estimation in FDD multiuser massive MIMO systems. By exploiting the low-rank nature of the channel covariance matrix, we first derive the minimum number of pilot symbols required to ensure perfect channel recovery, which is much less than the number of antennas at the base station. Further, under a general channel model that the channel vector of each user follows a Gaussian mixture distribution, the pilot symbols are designed by maximizing the weighted sum of the Shannon mutual information between the measurements of the users and their corresponding channel vectors on the complex Grassmannian manifold. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed information-theoretic pilot design for the downlink channel estimation in FDD massive MIMO systems.

In this paper, we consider the problem of Angle of Departure (AoD) based channel feedback in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems with multiple antennas at the users. We consider the use of Zero-Forcing Block Diagonalization (BD) as the downlink precoding scheme. We consider two different cases; one in which the number of streams intended for a user equals the number of antennas at that user and the other case in which the number of streams is less than the number of user antennas. BD requires the feedback of the subspace spanned by the channel matrix at the user or a subspace of it in the case of having less number of streams than the number of antennas at a specific user. Based on our channel model, we propose a channel feedback scheme that requires less feedback overhead compared to feeding back the whole channel matrix. Then, we quantify the rate gap between the rate of the system with perfect Channel State Information (CSI) at the massive MIMO Basestation (BS) and our proposed channel feedback scheme for a given number of feedback bits. Finally, we design feedback codebooks based on optimal subspace packing in the Grassmannian manifold. We show that our proposed codes achieve performance that is very close to the performance of the system with perfect CSI at the BS.

As an important part of the channel fading, large scale fading should be considered in downlink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. This paper investigates the downlink massive MIMO system over a large scale fading channel, when the base station takes advantage of maximum-radio transmission (MRT) precoding. The cases when the base station has perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) are considered respectively. Specially, through the analysis of single user's ergodic achievable rate, some novel and approximate expressions for the spectral efficiency (SE) are derived. Based on the approximate SE, the effect of the channel estimation error is analyzed intuitively. In addition, the average SE of all the users with different large-scale fading parameters is carefully investigated. Simulations validate that all the theoretical results coincide with numerical results and the large scale fading factors have little influence on SE reduction resulted from channel estimation.

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.

In wireless communications, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in which the base station (BS) is equipped with a large number of antennas can provide significant spectral and energy efficiency by means of simple signal processing. Therefore, massive MIMO is an attractive technology for next generation wireless communication systems and for green communications. There are two operation modes: time-division duplex (TDD) and frequency-division duplex (FDD) for massive MIMO systems, and the debate on the two modes is still discussed in the literature. The originator of massive MIMO systems, Marzetta, has presented the basic frame structures for both the TDD and the FDD modes. However, the basic frame structures do not carefully take the hardware impairments such as phase noise (PN) into account. In this paper, by taking the PN as the key hardware impairment into account, we recommend new and efficient frame structures for both the TDD and the FDD modes. The corresponding performance comparison between the two modes is also provided by using the data transmission efficiency (DTE) as the performance measurement. The comparison may help determine which mode should be used for massive MIMO systems.

Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology is one of the promising technologies for fifth generation (5G) cellular communications. In this technology, each cell has a base station (BS) with a large number of antennas, allowing the simultaneous use of the same resources (e.g., frequency and/or time slots) by multiple users of a cell. Therefore, massive MIMO systems can bring very high spectral and power efficiencies. However, this technology faces some important issues that need to be addressed. One of these issues is the performance degradation due to hardware impairments, since low-cost RF chains need to be employed. Another issue is the channel estimation and channel aging effects, especially in fast mobility environments. In this paper we will perform a comprehensive study on these two issues considering two of the most promising candidate waveforms for massive MIMO systems: Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and single-carrier frequency domain processing (SC-FDP). The studies and the results show that hardware impairments and inaccurate channel knowledge can degrade the performance of massive MIMO systems extensively. However, using suitable low complex estimation and compensation techniques and also selecting a suitable waveform can reduce these effects.

In this paper, the power allocation problem for downlink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with inter-user interference is investigated considering the tradeoff between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE). The minimum mean-square-error channel estimate and the rigorous closed-form expression of achievable downlink rate are first derived. Then, the multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) is formulated subject to maximum total transmission power constrain, where conflicting EE and SE are maximized simultaneously. To obtain the solution set characterized as a Pareto set, the MOP is transformed into a single-objective problem (SOP) using weighted sum method. We further convert the SOP into a convex optimization problem by adding an additional interference constraint, and the optimal power allocation algorithm is proposed by using dual method to balance EE and SE efficiently. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and illustrate the fundamental tradeoff between EE and SE for different parameter settings.

The combination of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and single-carrier (SC) aided spatial modulation (SM), is recently proposed for uplink multi-user transmission over dispersive channels, which has also attracted plenty of research interest. In this letter, first the spectral efficiency (SE) lower bound with non-uniform power allocation for uplink single-cell massive SC-SM MIMO systems is proposed, in which, the base station (BS) applies maximum ratio combining and many non-ideal factors of the wireless channels are all considered. Then, a barrier function-based gradient projection method is proposed to allocate power of each transmit antenna (TA) in terms of SE maximization. The SE lower bound is shown to be tight via simulation results, and simulation results also show that the SE gain introduced by our proposed PA algorithm is mainly dependent on the TA correlation and number of TAs.

Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system enhances area throughput by achieving high spectral efficiency. Pilot contamination limits the system performance. In this paper, we propose a pilot reuse factor adoption and applying multi-cell minimum mean square error (M-MMSE) precoding/combining scheme under the assumption of Laplacian correlation model to mitigate pilot contamination. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the other existing precoding/combining schemes in decontaminating pilots and achieving larger spectral efficiency. The price to pay for interference rejection and spectral efficiency improvement is a small reduction in the desired signal power and an increase in the system computational complexity.

In cellular systems, deploying a large number of antennas at the base station (BS), also called massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), can offer a huge improvement in system throughput. This performance gain achieved through coherent beamforming highly depends on having accurate channel state information (CSI) at the BS. Initially, massive MIMO was considered promising only for time division duplexing (TDD) systems because the downlink training overhead in frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems could be large. To reduce the overhead in FDD systems, we propose efficient eigenspace training and precoding. In the downlink training, the prebeamforming matrix is designed based on the spatial fading correlation to probe the channel and minimize the mean squared error (MSE) in channel estimation. In data transmission, the precoding matrix is designed based on instantaneous CSI to manage the inter-user interference. Our algorithms achieve significant savings in the downlink training because the overhead is associated with the dimension of prebeamforming matrix and no longer limited by the number of BS antennas. Compared with joint spatial division and multiplexing, our algorithms offer much lower MSE and, under some conditions, higher sum rates.

The sum-rate of the uplink multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is investigated. For the considered massive MIMO systems, the base station (BS) is equipped with a large number of antennas, which are assembled into several sub-arrays. Meanwhile, in each of the sub-arrays, antennas are densely installed. With the analysis of the sum-rate, we find that, for given total number of antennas, the sum-rate achieved by the considered systems improves, when the number of sub-arrays increases. However, the improvement of the achievable sum-rate is marginal, when the number of sub-arrays keeps on increasing. Furthermore, when the system is lightly loaded, even when all of antennas are assembled into a single compact antenna array, the achievable sum-rate is very close to that when all antennas are independent.