Multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) offers big advantages over conventional point-to-point MIMO: it works with cheap single-antenna terminals, a rich scattering environment is not required, and resource allocation is simplified because every active terminal utilizes all of the time-frequency bins. However, multi-user MIMO, as originally envisioned with roughly equal numbers of service-antennas and terminals and frequency division duplex operation, is not a scalable technology.Massive MIMO (also known as "Large-Scale Antenna Systems", "Very Large MIMO", "Hyper MIMO", "Full-Dimension MIMO" and "ARGOS") makes a clean break with current practice through the use of a large excess of service-antennas over active terminals and time division duplex operation. Extra antennas help by focusing energy into ever-smaller regions of space to bring huge improvements in throughput and radiated energy efficiency. Other benefits of massive MIMO include the extensive use of inexpensive low-power components, reduced latency, simplification of the media access control (MAC) layer, and robustness to intentional jamming. The anticipated throughput depend on the propagation environment providing asymptotically orthogonal channels to the terminals, but so far experiments have not disclosed any limitations in this regard. While massive MIMO renders many traditional research problems irrelevant, it uncovers entirely new problems that urgently need attention: the challenge of making many low-cost low-precision components that work effectively together, acquisition and synchronization for newly-joined terminals, the exploitation of extra degrees of freedom provided by the excess of service-antennas, reducing internal power consumption to achieve total energy efficiency reductions, and finding new deployment scenarios. This paper presents an overview of the massive MIMO concept and of contemporary research on the topic.1 Background: Multi-User MIMO Maturing MIMO, Multiple-Input Multiple Output, technology relies on multiple antennas to simultaneously transmit multiple streams of data in wireless communication systems. When MIMO is used to communicate with several terminals at the same time, we speak of multiuser MIMO. Here, we just say MU-MIMO for short.
Abstract-A Cell-Free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) system comprises a very large number of distributed access points (APs) which simultaneously serve a much smaller number of users over the same time/frequency resources based on directly measured channel characteristics. The APs and users have only one antenna each. The APs acquire channel state information through time-division duplex operation and the reception of uplink pilot signals transmitted by the users. The APs perform multiplexing/de-multiplexing through conjugate beamforming on the downlink and matched filtering on the uplink. Closed-form expressions for individual user uplink and downlink throughputs lead to max-min power control algorithms. Max-min power control ensures uniformly good service throughout the area of coverage. A pilot assignment algorithm helps to mitigate the effects of pilot contamination, but power control is far more important in that regard.Cell-Free Massive MIMO has considerably improved performance with respect to a conventional small-cell scheme, whereby each user is served by a dedicated AP, in terms of both 95%-likely per-user throughput and immunity to shadow fading spatial correlation. Under uncorrelated shadow fading conditions, the cell-free scheme provides nearly 5-fold improvement in 95%-likely per-user throughput over the small-cell scheme, and 10-fold improvement when shadow fading is correlated.
Space-time coding is a technique that promises greatly improved performance in wireless networks by using multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver. Space-Time Block Coding for Wireless Communications, first published in 2003, is an introduction to the theory of this technology. The authors develop the topic using a unified framework and cover a variety of topics ranging from information theory to performance analysis and space-time coding methods for both flat and frequency-selective fading multiple-antenna channels. The authors concentrate on key principles rather than specific practical applications, and present the material in a concise and accessible manner. Their treatment reviews the fundamental aspects of multiple-input, multiple-output communication theory, and guides the reader through a number of topics at the forefront of research and development. The book includes homework exercises and is aimed at graduate students and researchers working on wireless communications, as well as practitioners in the wireless industry.
Abstract-Wireless communications is one of the most successful technologies in modern years, given that an exponential growth rate in wireless traffic has been sustained for over a century (known as Cooper's law). This trend will certainly continue driven by new innovative applications; for example, augmented reality and internet-of-things.Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) has been identified as a key technology to handle orders of magnitude more data traffic. Despite the attention it is receiving from the communication community, we have personally witnessed that Massive MIMO is subject to several widespread misunderstandings, as epitomized by following (fictional) abstract:"The Massive MIMO technology uses a nearly infinite number of high-quality antennas at the base stations. By having at least an order of magnitude more antennas than active terminals, one can exploit asymptotic behaviors that some special kinds of wireless channels have. This technology looks great at first sight, but unfortunately the signal processing complexity is off the charts and the antenna arrays would be so huge that it can only be implemented in millimeter wave bands."The statements above are, in fact, completely false. In this overview article, we identify ten myths and explain why they are not true. We also ask a question that is critical for the practical adoption of the technology and which will require intense future research activities to answer properly. We provide references to key technical papers that support our claims, while a further list of related overview and technical papers can be found at the Massive MIMO Info Point: http://massivemimo.eu I. INTRODUCTION Massive MIMO is a multi-user MIMO technology where each base station (BS) is equipped with an array of M active antenna elements and utilizes these to communicate with K single-antenna terminals-over the same time and frequency band. The general multi-user MIMO concept has been around for decades, but the vision of actually deploying BSs with more than a handful of service antennas is relatively new [1]. By coherent processing of the signals over the array, transmit precoding can be used in the downlink to focus each signal at its desired terminal and receive combining can be used in the uplink to discriminate between signals sent from different terminals. The more antennas that are used, the finer the spatial focusing can be. An illustration of these concepts is given in Figure 1a.The canonical Massive MIMO system operates in timedivision duplex (TDD) mode, where the uplink and downlink transmissions take place in the same frequency resource but are separated in time. The physical propagation channels are reciprocal-meaning that the channel responses are the same in both directions-which can be utilized in TDD operation. In particular, Massive MIMO systems exploit the reciprocity to estimate the channel responses on the uplink and then
We consider the cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink, where a very large number of distributed multiple-antenna access points (APs) serve many single-antenna users in the same time-frequency resource. A simple (distributed) conjugate beamforming scheme is applied at each AP via the use of local channel state information (CSI). This CSI is acquired through time-division duplex operation and the reception of uplink training signals transmitted by the users. We derive a closed-form expression for the spectral efficiency taking into account the effects of channel estimation errors and power control. This closed-form result enables us to analyze the effects of backhaul power consumption, the number of APs, and the number of antennas per AP on the total energy efficiency, as well as, to design an optimal power allocation algorithm. The optimal power allocation algorithm aims at maximizing the total energy efficiency, subject to a per-user spectral efficiency constraint and a per-AP power constraint. Compared with the equal power control, our proposed power allocation scheme can double the total energy efficiency. Furthermore, we propose AP selections schemes, in which each user chooses a subset of APs, to reduce the power consumption caused by the backhaul links. With our proposed AP selection schemes, the total energy efficiency increases significantly, especially for large numbers of APs. Moreover, under a requirement of good quality-of-service for all users, cell-free massive MIMO outperforms the colocated counterpart in terms of energy efficiency.
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