Noncooperative Cellular Wireless with Unlimited Numbers of Base Station Antennas
TL;DR: A cellular base station serves a multiplicity of single-antenna terminals over the same time-frequency interval and a complete multi-cellular analysis yields a number of mathematically exact conclusions and points to a desirable direction towards which cellular wireless could evolve.
Abstract: A cellular base station serves a multiplicity of single-antenna terminals over the same time-frequency interval. Time-division duplex operation combined with reverse-link pilots enables the base station to estimate the reciprocal forward- and reverse-link channels. The conjugate-transpose of the channel estimates are used as a linear precoder and combiner respectively on the forward and reverse links. Propagation, unknown to both terminals and base station, comprises fast fading, log-normal shadow fading, and geometric attenuation. In the limit of an infinite number of antennas a complete multi-cellular analysis, which accounts for inter-cellular interference and the overhead and errors associated with channel-state information, yields a number of mathematically exact conclusions and points to a desirable direction towards which cellular wireless could evolve. In particular the effects of uncorrelated noise and fast fading vanish, throughput and the number of terminals are independent of the size of the cells, spectral efficiency is independent of bandwidth, and the required transmitted energy per bit vanishes. The only remaining impairment is inter-cellular interference caused by re-use of the pilot sequences in other cells (pilot contamination) which does not vanish with unlimited number of antennas.
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TL;DR: This paper discusses all of these topics, identifying key challenges for future research and preliminary 5G standardization activities, while providing a comprehensive overview of the current literature, and in particular of the papers appearing in this special issue.
Abstract: What will 5G be? What it will not be is an incremental advance on 4G. The previous four generations of cellular technology have each been a major paradigm shift that has broken backward compatibility. Indeed, 5G will need to be a paradigm shift that includes very high carrier frequencies with massive bandwidths, extreme base station and device densities, and unprecedented numbers of antennas. However, unlike the previous four generations, it will also be highly integrative: tying any new 5G air interface and spectrum together with LTE and WiFi to provide universal high-rate coverage and a seamless user experience. To support this, the core network will also have to reach unprecedented levels of flexibility and intelligence, spectrum regulation will need to be rethought and improved, and energy and cost efficiencies will become even more critical considerations. This paper discusses all of these topics, identifying key challenges for future research and preliminary 5G standardization activities, while providing a comprehensive overview of the current literature, and in particular of the papers appearing in this special issue.
7,139 citations
Cites background from "Noncooperative Cellular Wireless wi..."
...• An excellent pairing for MIMO, since OFDM allows for the spatial interference from multiantenna transmission to be dealt with at a subcarrier level, without the added complication of intersymbol interference....
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TL;DR: 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.
Abstract: Multi-user 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 extensive use of inexpensive low-power components, reduced latency, simplification of the MAC layer, and robustness against intentional jamming. The anticipated throughput depends 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 article presents an overview of the massive MIMO concept and contemporary research on the topic.
6,184 citations
Cites background from "Noncooperative Cellular Wireless wi..."
...In [13], for a typical operating scenario, the maximum number of orthogonal pilot sequences in a one millisecond coherence interval is estimated to be about 200....
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...Pilot contamination as a basic phenomenon is not really specific to massive MIMO, but its effect on massive MIMO appears to be much more profound than in classical MIMO [13,14]....
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...This directed interference grows with the number of service-antennas at the same rate as the desired signal [13]....
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TL;DR: The gains in multiuser systems are even more impressive, because such systems offer the possibility to transmit simultaneously to several users and the flexibility to select what users to schedule for reception at any given point in time.
Abstract: Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is maturing and is being incorporated into emerging wireless broadband standards like long-term evolution (LTE) [1]. For example, the LTE standard allows for up to eight antenna ports at the base station. Basically, the more antennas the transmitter/receiver is equipped with, and the more degrees of freedom that the propagation channel can provide, the better the performance in terms of data rate or link reliability. More precisely, on a quasi static channel where a code word spans across only one time and frequency coherence interval, the reliability of a point-to-point MIMO link scales according to Prob(link outage) ` SNR-ntnr where nt and nr are the numbers of transmit and receive antennas, respectively, and signal-to-noise ratio is denoted by SNR. On a channel that varies rapidly as a function of time and frequency, and where circumstances permit coding across many channel coherence intervals, the achievable rate scales as min(nt, nr) log(1 + SNR). The gains in multiuser systems are even more impressive, because such systems offer the possibility to transmit simultaneously to several users and the flexibility to select what users to schedule for reception at any given point in time [2].
5,158 citations
Cites background from "Noncooperative Cellular Wireless wi..."
...Our emphasis on TDD rather than FDD is driven by the need to acquire channel state-information between extreme numbers of service antennas and much smaller numbers of terminals....
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...For example, 11 directive antennas pointing in distinct directions tend toexperience a lower correlation than nondirective antennas, since each of these directive antennas“see” signals arriving from a distinct angular sector....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe five technologies that could lead to both architectural and component disruptive design changes: device-centric architectures, millimeter wave, massive MIMO, smarter devices, and native support for machine-to-machine communications.
Abstract: New research directions will lead to fundamental changes in the design of future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. This article describes five technologies that could lead to both architectural and component disruptive design changes: device-centric architectures, millimeter wave, massive MIMO, smarter devices, and native support for machine-to-machine communications. The key ideas for each technology are described, along with their potential impact on 5G and the research challenges that remain.
3,711 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the tradeoff between the energy efficiency and spectral efficiency of a single-antenna system is quantified for a channel model that includes small-scale fading but not large scale fading, and it is shown that the use of moderately large antenna arrays can improve the spectral and energy efficiency with orders of magnitude compared to a single antenna system.
Abstract: A multiplicity of autonomous terminals simultaneously transmits data streams to a compact array of antennas. The array uses imperfect channel-state information derived from transmitted pilots to extract the individual data streams. The power radiated by the terminals can be made inversely proportional to the square-root of the number of base station antennas with no reduction in performance. In contrast if perfect channel-state information were available the power could be made inversely proportional to the number of antennas. Lower capacity bounds for maximum-ratio combining (MRC), zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) detection are derived. An MRC receiver normally performs worse than ZF and MMSE. However as power levels are reduced, the cross-talk introduced by the inferior maximum-ratio receiver eventually falls below the noise level and this simple receiver becomes a viable option. The tradeoff between the energy efficiency (as measured in bits/J) and spectral efficiency (as measured in bits/channel use/terminal) is quantified for a channel model that includes small-scale fading but not large-scale fading. It is shown that the use of moderately large antenna arrays can improve the spectral and energy efficiency with orders of magnitude compared to a single-antenna system.
2,770 citations
References
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TL;DR: The result shows that information-theoretic limits of wireless communication problems can be rigorously obtained without relying on stochastic fading channel models, but studying their physical geometric structure.
Abstract: It is shown that the capacity scaling of wireless networks is subject to a fundamental limitation which is independent of power attenuation and fading models. It is a degrees of freedom limitation which is due to the laws of physics. By distributing uniformly an order of n users wishing to establish pairwise independent communications at fixed wavelength inside a two-dimensional domain of size of the order of n, there are an order of n communication requests originating from the central half of the domain to its outer half. Physics dictates that the number of independent information channels across these two regions is only of the order of radicn, so the per-user information capacity must follow an inverse square-root of n law. This result shows that information-theoretic limits of wireless communication problems can be rigorously obtained without relying on stochastic fading channel models, but studying their physical geometric structure.
238 citations
"Noncooperative Cellular Wireless wi..." refers background in this paper
...Section VII discusses the ramifications of our results....
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28 Jun 2009
TL;DR: A multi-cell MMSE-based precoding is proposed that, when combined with frequency/time/pilot reuse techniques, mitigate this problem of pilot contamination.
Abstract: This paper considers a multi-cell multiple antenna system with precoding at the base stations for downlink transmission. To enable precoding, channel state information (CSI) is obtained via uplink training. This paper mathematically characterizes the impact that uplink training has on the performance of multi-cell multiple antenna systems. When non-orthogonal training sequences are used for uplink training, it is shown that the precoding matrix used by the base station in one cell becomes corrupted by the channel between that base station and the users in other cells. This problem of pilot contamination is analyzed in this paper. A multi-cell MMSE-based precoding is proposed that, when combined with frequency/time/pilot reuse techniques, mitigate this problem.
213 citations
"Noncooperative Cellular Wireless wi..." refers background in this paper
...A new phenomenon emerges which was not encountered in the single-cell scenario of [7]: pilot contamination [ 9 ]....
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01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that the capacity scaling of wireless networks is subject to a fundamental limitation which is independent of power attenuation and fading models, and that the per-user information capacity must follow an inverse square root of n law.
Abstract: It is shown that the capacity scaling of wireless networks is subject to a fundamental limitation which is independent of power attenuation and fading models. It is a degrees of freedom limitation which is due to the laws of physics. By distributing uniformly an order of n users wishing to establish pairwise independent communications at fixed wavelength inside a two-dimensional domain of size of the order of n, there are an order of n communication requests originating from the central half of the domain to its outer half. Physics dictates that the number of independent information channels across these two regions is only of the order of radicn, so the per-user information capacity must follow an inverse square-root of n law. This result shows that information-theoretic limits of wireless communication problems can be rigorously obtained without relying on stochastic fading channel models, but studying their physical geometric structure.
199 citations
11 Dec 2006
TL;DR: The ultimate performance limits of inter-cell coordinatation in a cellular downlink network are quantified and a simple upper bound on the max-min rate of any scheme is obtained.
Abstract: We quantify the ultimate performance limits of inter-cell coordinatation in a cellular downlink network. The goal is to achieve fairness by maximizing the minimum rate in the network subject to per base power constraints. We first solve the max-min rate problem for a particular zero-forcing dirty paper coding scheme so as to obtain an achievable max-min rate, which serves as a lower bound on the ultimate limit. We then obtain a simple upper bound on the max-min rate of any scheme, and show that the rate achievable by the zero-forcing dirty paper coding scheme is close to this upper bound. We also extend our analysis to coordinated networks with multiple antennas.
182 citations
18 Jun 1995
TL;DR: The authors show through simulation of a multiple user cellular network that the cooperative transmission network algorithm is capable of improving network frequency re-use capacity by a factor of 5 to 8.
Abstract: A method is proposed for forming an adaptive phased array transmission beam pattern at a base station without any knowledge of array geometry, path angles or mobile feedback. Estimates of receive vector channels are used to form a transmit weight vector optimization problem. The authors provide closed form solutions for both the single user case and the multiple user case. They show through simulation of a multiple user cellular network that the cooperative transmission network algorithm is capable of improving network frequency re-use capacity by a factor of 5 to 8.
158 citations
"Noncooperative Cellular Wireless wi..." refers background in this paper
...An alternative FDD scheme would depend on the correctness of the untested conjecture that the forward- and reversechannels of an FDD system, although statistically independent, have similar spatial eigenvalues when corrected for wavelength differences [21], [22]....
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