Massive MIMO is an emerging technology for future wireless systems that has received much attention from both academia and industry recently. The most prominent feature of Massive MIMO is that the base station is equiped with a large number of antennas. It is therefore important to create scalable architectures to enable simple deployment in different configurations.In this thesis, a distributed architecture for performing the baseband processing in a massive OFDM MU-MIMO system is proposed and analyzed. The proposed architecture is based on connecting several identical nodes in a K-ary tree. It is shown that, depending on the chosen algorithms, all or most computations can be performed in a distrbuted manner. Also, the computational load of each node does not depend on the number of nodes in the tree (except for some timing issues) which implies simple scalability of the system.It is shown that it should be enough that each node contains one or two complex multipliers and a few complex adders running at a couple of hundres MHz to support specifications similar to LTE. Additionally the nodes must communicate with each other over links with data rates in the order of some Gbps.Finally, a VHDL implementation of the system is proposed. The implementation is parameterized such that a system can be generated from a given specification. Nyckelord KeywordsElektroteknik, ASIC, Massiv MIMO AbstractMassive MIMO is an emerging technology for future wireless systems that has received much attention from both academia and industry recently. The most prominent feature of Massive MIMO is that the base station is equiped with a large number of antennas. It is therefore important to create scalable architectures to enable simple deployment in different configurations.In this thesis, a distributed architecture for performing the baseband processing in a massive OFDM MU-MIMO system is proposed and analyzed. The proposed architecture is based on connecting several identical nodes in a K-ary tree. It is shown that, depending on the chosen algorithms, all or most computations can be performed in a distrbuted manner. Also, the computational load of each node does not depend on the number of nodes in the tree (except for some timing issues) which implies simple scalability of the system.It is shown that it should be enough that each node contains one or two complex multipliers and a few complex adders running at a couple of hundres MHz to support specifications similar to LTE. Additionally the nodes must communicate with each other over links with data rates in the order of some Gbps.Finally, a VHDL implementation of the system is proposed. The implementation is parameterized such that a system can be generated from a given specification.iii

Approximate matrix inversion based on Neumann series has seen a recent increased interest motivated by massive MIMO systems. There, the matrices are in many cases diagonally dominant, and, hence, a reasonable approximation can be obtained within a few iterations of a Neumann series. In this work, we clarify that the complexity of exact methods are about the same as when three terms are used for the Neumann series, so in this case, the complexity is not lower as often claimed. The second common argument for Neumann series approximation, higher parallelism, is indeed correct. However, in most current practical use cases, such a high degree of parallelism is not required to obtain a low latency realization. Hence, we conclude that a careful evaluation, based on accuracy and latency requirements must be performed and that exact matrix inversion is in fact viable in many more cases than the current literature claims.

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In this work, the effect of latency for three different positive definite matrix inversion algorithms when implemented on parallel and pipelined processing elements is considered. The work is motivated by the fact that in a massive MIMO system, matrix inversion needs to be performed between estimating the channels and producing the transmitted downlink signal, which means that the latency of the matrix inversion has a significant impact on the system performance. It is shown that, despite the algorithms having different complexity, all three algorithms can have the lowest latency for different number of processing elements and pipeline levels. Especially, in systems with many processing elements, the algorithm with the highest complexity has the lowest latency.