Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems combined with beamforming antenna array technologies are expected to play a key role in next-generation wireless communication systems (5G), which will be deployed in 2020 and beyond. The main objective of this review paper is to discuss the state-of-the-art research on the most favourable types of beamforming techniques that can be deployed in massive MIMO systems and to clarify the importance of beamforming techniques in massive MIMO systems for eliminating and resolving the many technical hitches that massive MIMO system implementation faces. Classifications of optimal beamforming techniques that are used in wireless communication systems are reviewed in detail to determine which techniques are more suitable for deployment in massive MIMO systems to improve system throughput and reduce intra- and inter-cell interference. To overcome the limitations in the literature, we have suggested an optimal beamforming technique that can provide the highest performance in massive MIMO systems, satisfying the requirements of next-generation wireless communication systems.
We present a measurement campaign to characterize an indoor massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel system, using a 64-element virtual linear array, a 64-element virtual planar array, and a 128-element virtual planar array. The array topologies are generated using a 3D mechanical turntable. The measurements are conducted at 2, 4, 6, 11, 15, and 22 GHz, with a large bandwidth of 200 MHz. Both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) propagation scenarios are considered. The typical channel parameters are extracted, including path loss, shadow fading, power delay profile, and root mean square (RMS) delay spread. The frequency dependence of these channel parameters is analyzed. The correlation between shadow fading and RMS delay spread is discussed. In addition, the performance of the standard linear precoder—the matched filter, which can be used for intersymbol interference (ISI) mitigation by shortening the RMS delay spread, is investigated. Other performance measures, such as entropy capacity, Demmel condition number, and channel ellipticity, are analyzed. The measured channels, which are in a rich-scattering indoor environment, are found to achieve a performance close to that in independent and identically distributed Rayleigh channels even in an LOS scenario.
Relay-aided device-to-device (D2D) communication is a promising technology for the next-generation cellular network. We study the transmission schemes for an amplify-and-forward relay-aided D2D system which has multiple antennas. To circumvent the prohibitive complexity problem of traditional maximum likelihood (ML) detection for full-rate space-time block code (FSTBC) transmission, two low-complexity detection methods are proposed, i.e., the detection methods with the ML-combining (MLC) algorithm and the joint conditional ML (JCML) detector. Particularly, the method with the JCML detector reduces detection delay at the cost of more storage and performs well with parallel implementation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed detection methods achieve a symbol error probability similar to that of the traditional ML detector for FSTBC transmission but with less complexity, and the performance of FSTBC transmission is significantly better than that of spatial multiplexing transmission. Diversity analysis for the proposed detection methods is also demonstrated by simulations.
This article is focused on secure relay beamformer design with a correlated channel model in the relay-eavesdropper network. In this network, a single-antenna source-destination pair transmits secure information with the help of an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay equipped with multiple antennas, and the legitimate and eavesdropping channels are correlated. The relay cannot obtain the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper, and has only the knowledge of correlation information between the legitimate and eavesdropping channels. Depending on this information, we derive the conditional distribution of the eavesdropping channel. Two beamformers at the relay are studied for the approximate ergodic secrecy rate: (1) the generalized match-andforward (GMF) beamformer to maximize the legitimate channel rate, and (2) the general-rank beamformer (GRBF). In addition, one lower-bound-maximizing (LBM) beamformer at the relay is discussed for maximizing the lower bound of the ergodic secrecy rate. We find that the GMF beamformer is the optimal rank-one beamformer, that the GRBF is the iteratively optimal beamformer, and that the performance of the LBM beamformer for the ergodic secrecy rate gets close to that of the GRBF for the approximate secrecy rate. It can also be observed that when the relay has lower power or the channel gain of the second hop is low, the performance of the GMF beamformer surpasses that of the GRBF. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the beamformers’ performance.
We study the optimal precoding for a full-duplex (FD) system, where one FD multi-antenna base station (BS) respectively transmits to and receives from two half-duplex single-antenna mobile users (MUs) on the same time slot and frequency band. At the FD BS, the received signal from the desired MU is severely affected by the extremely strong self-interference (SI) from its transmit antennas to the receive antennas. In the presence of residual SI after imperfect SI cancellation, the downlink transmission rate maximization problem subject to a targeted uplink rate is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem to characterize the achievable rate region for the considered system. Considering the case in which the SI channel is strongly correlated, the above problem is transformed into a convex problem by exploiting the rank-one property of the SI channel, which can be solved efficiently. Finally, numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Traditional cellular networks require the downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) of mobile users (MUs) to be associated with a single base station (BS). However, the power gap between BSs and MUs in different transmission environments results in the BS with the strongest downlink differing from the BS with the strongest uplink. In addition, the significant increase in the number of wireless machine type communication (MTC) devices accessing cellular networks has created a DL/UL traffic imbalance with higher traffic volume on the uplink. In this paper, a joint user association and resource partition framework for downlink-uplink decoupling (DUDe) is developed for a tiered heterogeneous cellular network (HCN). Different from the traditional association rules such as maximal received power and range extension, a coalition game based scheme is proposed for the optimal user association with DUDe. The stability and convergence of this scheme are proven and shown to converge to a Nash equilibrium at a geometric rate. Moreover, the DL and UL optimal bandwidth partition for BSs is derived based on user association considering fairness. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which enhances the sum rate compared with other user association strategies.
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), small cell, and full-duplex are promising techniques for future 5G communication systems, where interference has become the most challenging issue to be addressed. In this paper, we provide an interference coordination framework for a two-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet) that consists of a massive-MIMO enabled macro-cell base station (MBS) and a number of full-duplex small-cell base stations (SBSs). To suppress the interferences and maximize the throughput, the full-duplex mode of each SBS at the wireless backhaul link (i.e., in-band or out-of-band), which has a different impact on the interference pattern, should be carefully selected. To address this problem, we propose two centralized algorithms, a genetic algorithm (GEA) and a greedy algorithm (GRA). To sufficiently reduce the computational overhead of the MBS, a distributed graph coloring algorithm (DGCA) based on price is further proposed. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms significantly improve the system throughput.
We propose a novel method for joint two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) and channel estimation with data detection for uniform rectangular arrays (URAs) for the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The conventional DOA estimation algorithms usually assume that the channel impulse responses are known exactly. However, the large number of antennas in a massive MIMO system can lead to a challenge in estimating accurate corresponding channel impulse responses. In contrast, a joint DOA and channel estimation scheme is proposed, which first estimates the channel impulse responses for the links between the transmitters and antenna elements using training sequences. After that, the DOAs of the waves are estimated based on a unitary ESPRIT algorithm using previous channel impulse response estimates instead of accurate channel impulse responses and then, the enhanced channel impulse response estimates can be obtained. The proposed estimator enjoys closedform expressions, and thus it bypasses the search and pairing processes. In addition, a low-complexity approach toward data detection is presented by reducing the dimension of the inversion matrix in massive MIMO systems. Different cases for the proposed method are analyzed by changing the number of antennas. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.
In this paper, we investigate physical layer security for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in amplify-and-forward relay networks. We propose a joint robust cooperative beamforming and artificial noise scheme for secure communication and efficient wireless energy transfer. Specifically, by treating the energy receiver as a potential eavesdropper and assuming that only imperfect channel state information can be obtained, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the worst-case secrecy rate between the source and the legitimate information receiver under both the power constraint at the relays and the wireless power harvest constraint at the energy receiver. Since such a problem is non-convex and hard to tackle, we propose a two-level optimization approach which involves a one-dimensional search and semidefinite relaxation. Simulation results show that the proposed robust scheme achieves better worst-case secrecy rate performance than other schemes.