The spectral efficiency achievable with joint processing of pilot and data symbol observations is compared with that achievable through the conventional (separate) approach of first estimating the channel on the basis of the pilot symbols alone, and subsequently detecting the data symbols. Studied on the basis of a mutual information lower bound, joint processing is found to provide a non-negligible advantage relative to separate processing, particularly for fast fading. It is shown that, regardless of the fading rate, only a very small number of pilot symbols (at most one per transmit antenna and per channel coherence interval) should be transmitted if joint processing is allowed.
The fundamental limitation of massive MIMO technology is pilot contamination effect. This effect occurs during uplink training when terminals use the same orthogonal signals. In this paper, a pilot reuse factor with large scale fading precoding is proposed to mitigate the pilot contamination effect. The pilot reuse factor is designed to assign unique orthogonal signals to the adjacent cells. These unique orthogonal signals are reused only within the cell and hence, intra-pilot contamination is the only concern. Large scale fading precoding is then used to mitigate the intra-pilot contamination…
We present nonasymptotic bounds on the maximum coding rate achievable over a Rician block-fading channel for a fixed packet size and a fixed packet error probability. Our bounds, which apply to the scenario where no a priori channel state information is available at the receiver, allow one to quantify the tradeoff between the rate gains resulting from the exploitation of time-frequency diversity and the rate loss resulting from fast channel variations and pilot-symbol overhead.
Leveraging recent results in finite-blocklength information theory, we investigate the problem of designing a control channel in a 5G system. The setup involves the transmission, under stringent latency and reliability constraints, of a short data packet containing a small information payload, over a propagation channel that offers limited frequency diversity and no time diversity. We present an achievability bound, built upon the random-coding union bound with parameter $s$ (Martinez & Guillén i Fàbregas, 2011), which relies on quadrature phase-shift keying modulation, pilot-assisted transmis…
We propose an approach where each user independently seeks to minimize the amount of time that they occupy the channel. Essentially, we seek to minimize the number of transmitted symbols required to communicate a packet assuming variable-length coding with feedback. Users send a pilot sequence to estimate the channel quality and decide whether to proceed with a transmission or wait for the next opportunity. Thus a user may choose to leave the channel even though it has already gained access, in order to increase the network throughput and also save its own energy resources. This paper optimize…
We present a novel closed-form lower bound on the Gaussian-input mutual information for noncoherent communication (i.e., in which neither transmitter nor receiver are cognizant of the fading state) over a frequency-flat fading channel with additive noise. Our bound yields positive (non-trivial) values even in the most challenging case of zero-mean fast fading, a regime in which the conventional approach of orthogonal time-multiplexed pilots is unavailing and for which, to the best of the author's knowledge, no simple analytical bound is known. Its derivation relies on endowing the transmit sig…
We propose pilot reuse (PR) in single cell for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission to reduce the pilot overhead. For spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels, we establish a relationship between channel spatial correlations and channel power angle spectrum when the base station antenna number tends to infinity. With this channel model, we show that sum mean square error (MSE) of channel estimation can be minimized provided that channel angle of arrival intervals of the user terminals reusing the pilots are non-overlapping, which shows feasibility of PR ove…
In this work we treat the unsourced random access problem on a Rayleigh block-fading AWGN channel with multiple receive antennas. Specifically, we consider the slowly fading scenario where the coherence block-length is large compared to the number of active users and the message can be transmitted in one coherence block. Unsourced random access refers to a form of grant-free random access where users are considered to be a-priori indistinguishable and the receiver recovers a list of transmitted messages up to permutation. In this work we show that, when the coherence block length is large enou…
We investigate a pilot allocation problem in wireless networks over Markovian fading channels. In wireless systems, the Channel State Information (CSI) is collected at the Base Station (BS), in particular, this paper considers a pilot-aided channel estimation method (TDD mode). Typically, there are less available pilots than users, hence at each slot the scheduler needs to decide an allocation of pilots to users with the goal of maximizing the long-term average throughput. There is an inherent tradeoff in how the limited pilots are used: assign a pilot to a user with up-to-date CSI and good ch…
Massive multiple-input multiple-output is a very important technology for future fifth-generation systems. However, massive massive multiple input multiple output systems are still limited because of pilot contamination, impacting the data rate due to the non-orthogonality of pilot sequences transmitted by users in the same cell to the neighboring cells. We propose a channel estimation with complete knowledge of large-scale fading by using an orthogonal pilot reuse sequence to eliminate PC in edge users with poor channel quality based on the estimation of large-scale fading and performance ana…
We present nonasymptotic upper and lower bounds on the maximum coding rate achievable when transmitting short packets over a Rician memoryless block-fading channel for a given requirement on the packet error probability. We focus on the practically relevant scenario in which there is no \emph{a priori} channel state information available at the transmitter and at the receiver. An upper bound built upon the min-max converse is compared to two lower bounds: the first one relies on a noncoherent transmission strategy in which the fading channel is not estimated explicitly at the receiver; the sec…
Random access is necessary in crowded scenarios due to the limitation of pilot sequences and the intermittent pattern of device activity. Nowadays, most of the related works are based on independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channels. However, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels are not always i.i.d. in realistic outdoor wireless propagation environments. In this paper, a device grouping and pilot set allocation algorithm is proposed for the uplink massive MIMO systems over spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels. Firstly, devices are divided into multiple g…
We study the problem of unsourced random access (URA) over Rayleigh block-fading channels with a receiver equipped with multiple antennas. We employ multiple stages of orthogonal pilots, each of which is randomly picked from a codebook. In the proposed scheme, each user encodes its message using a polar code and appends it to the selected pilot sequences to construct its transmitted signal. Accordingly, the received signal consists of superposition of the users' signals each composed of multiple orthogonal pilot parts and a polar coded part. We use an iterative approach for decoding the transm…
We consider a hardware-impaired multi-cell Rician faded massive multi-input multi-output (mMIMO) system with two-layer pilot decontamination precoding, also known as large-scale fading precoding (LSFP). Each BS is equipped with a flexible dynamic analog-to-digital converter (ADC)/digital-to-analog converter (DAC) architecture and the user equipments (UEs) have low-resolution ADCs. Further, both BS and UEs have hardwareimpaired radio frequency chains. The dynamic ADC/DAC architecture allows us to vary the resolution of ADC/DAC connected to each BS antenna, and suitably choose them to maximize t…
This paper investigates the effective capacity of a point-to-point ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) transmission over multiple parallel sub-channels at finite blocklength (FBL) with imperfect channel state information (CSI). Based on reasonable assumptions and approximations, we derive the effective capacity as a function of the pilot length, decoding error probability, transmit power and the sub-channel number. Then we reveal significant impact of the above parameters on the effective capacity. A closed-form lower bound of the effective capacity is derived and an alternating o…
Time-varying fast fading channels present a major challenge in the design of wireless communication systems. Pilot Symbol Assisted Modulation (PSAM) has been introduced to mitigate the effects of fading and allow coherent demodulation. Our work studies the performance of \emph{non-feedback} adaptive PSAM scheme over time-varying Rayleigh fading channels. A modular method is introduced for computing the rates in an efficient manner. Moreover, four transmission policies are analyzed and we show how optimal training in terms of duration and power allocation varies with the channel conditions and …
We investigate the probability that the peak age of information in a point-to-point communication system operating over a multiantenna wireless fading channel exceeds a predetermined value. The packets are scheduled according to a last-come first-serve policy with preemption in service, and are transmitted over the channel using a simple automatic repetition request protocol. We consider quadrature phase shift keying modulation, pilot-assisted transmission, maximum-likelihood channel estimation, and mismatched scaled nearest-neighbor decoding. Our analysis, which exploits nonasymptotic tools i…
Study of polar codes in fading channels is of great importance when applying polar codes in wireless communications. Channel estimation is a fundamental step for communication to be possible in fading channels. For both systematic and non-systematic polar codes, construction of them is based on an information set and the known frozen bits. Efficient implementation of systematic and non-systematic polar codes exists. When it comes to channel estimation or channel tracking, additional pilot symbols are inserted in the codeword traditionally. In this paper, to improve the performance of polar cod…
In this paper, we investigate the system performance of a multi-cell multi-user (MU) hybrid millimeter wave (mmWave) communications in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network. Due to the reuse of pilot symbols among different cells, the performance of channel estimation is expected to be degraded by pilot contamination, which is considered as a fundamental performance bottleneck of conventional multicell MU massive MIMO networks. To analyze the impact of pilot contamination to the system performance, we first derive the closed-form approximation of the normalized mean squared error (MS…
This work considers the uplink (UL) of a multi-cell massive MIMO system with $L$ cells, having each $K$ mono-antenna users communicating with an $N-$antennas base station (BS). The channel model involves Rician fading with distinct per-user Rician factors and channel correlation matrices and takes into account pilot contamination and imperfect CSI. The objective is to evaluate the performances of such systems with different single-cell and multi-cell detection methods. In the former, we investigate MRC and single-cell MMSE (S-MMSE); as to the latter, we are interested in multi-cell MMSE (M-MMS…
This paper considers the large-scale fading precoding design for mitigating the pilot contamination in the downlink of multi-cell massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems. Rician fading with spatially correlated channels are considered where the line-of-sight (LOS) components of the channels are randomly phase-shifted in each coherence block. The large-scale fading precoding weights are designed based on maximizing the product of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) of the users, which provides a good balance between max-min fairness and sum rate maximization. The …
Device activity detection and channel estimation for massive grant-free access under frequency-selective fading have unfortunately been an outstanding problem. This paper aims to address the challenge. Specifically, we present an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based massive grant-free access scheme for a wideband system with one M-antenna base station (BS), N single-antenna Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and P channel taps. We obtain two different but equivalent models for the received pilot signals under frequency-selective Rayleigh fading. Based on each model, we formul…
Consider an Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenario in which devices transmit sporadically using short packets with few pilot symbols. Each device transmits over a fading channel and is characterized by an amplifier with a unique non-linear transfer function. The number of pilots is generally insufficient to obtain an accurate estimate of the end-to-end channel, which includes the effects of fading and of the amplifier's distortion. This paper proposes to tackle this problem using meta-learning. Accordingly, pilots from previous IoT transmissions are used as meta-training in order to learn a demodul…
In time-varying fading channels, channel coefficients are estimated using pilot symbols that are transmitted every coherence interval. For channels with high Doppler spread, the rapid channel variations over time will require considerable bandwidth for pilot transmission, leading to poor throughput. In this paper, we propose a novel receiver architecture using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that learns the channel variations and thereby reduces the number of pilot symbols required for channel estimation. Specifically, we design and train an RNN to learn the correlation in the time-varyi…
In this paper, an analytical framework for evaluating the performance of scalable cell-free massive MIMO (SCF-mMIMO) systems in which all user equipments (UEs) and access points (APs) employ finite resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and operates under correlated Rician fading, is presented. By using maximal-ratio combining (MRC) detection, generic expressions for the uplink (UL) spectral efficiency (SE) for both distributed and centralized schemes are derived. In order to further reduce the computational complexity (CC) of the original local …
The scaling of coherent and non-coherent channel capacity is studied in a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) block Rayleigh fading channel as both the bandwidth and the number of receiver antennas go to infinity jointly with the transmit power fixed. The transmitter has no channel state information (CSI), while the receiver may have genie-provided CSI (coherent receiver), or the channel statistics only (non-coherent receiver). Our results show that if the available bandwidth is smaller than a threshold bandwidth which is proportional (up to leading order terms) to the square root of the numbe…
The ergodic and outage channel capacity of different optimal and suboptimal combinations of transmit power and modulation rate adaptation strategies over a joint fading and two-path shadowing (JFTS) fading/shadowing channel is studied in this paper. Analytically tractable expressions for channel capacity are obtained, assuming perfect channel side information (CSI) at the receiver and/or the transmitter with negligible feedback delay. Furthermore, the impacts of the JFTS parameters on the channel capacity achieved by these adaptive transmission techniques are determined.
Massive multiple-input--multiple-output (MIMO) systems can suffer from coherent intercell interference due to the phenomenon of pilot contamination. This paper investigates a two-layer decoding method that mitigates both coherent and non-coherent interference in multi-cell Massive MIMO. To this end, each base station (BS) first estimates the channels to intra-cell users using either minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) or element-wise MMSE (EW-MMSE) estimation based on uplink pilots. The estimates are used for local decoding on each BS followed by a second decoding layer where the BSs cooperate t…
This paper optimizes the pilot assignment and pilot transmit powers to mitigate pilot contamination in Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems. While prior works have treated pilot assignment as a combinatorial problem, we achieve a more tractable problem formulation by directly optimizing the pilot sequences. To this end, we compute a lower bound on the uplink (UL) spectral efficiency (SE), for Rayleigh fading channels with maximum ratio (MR) detection and arbitrary pilot sequences. We optimize the max-min SE with respect to the pilot sequences and pilot powers, under power budg…
Fully Asynchronous Unsourced Random Access over Fading Channels
IHP - Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics（IHP-莱布尼茨高性能微电子研究所）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
This letter presents and analyzes orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based multi-carrier transmission for cell-free massive multi-input multi-output (CFmMIMO) over frequency-selective fading channels. Frequency-domain conjugate beamforming, pilot assignment, and user-specific resource allocation are proposed. CFmMIMO-OFDM is scalable to serve a massive number of users and is flexible to offer diverse data rates for heterogeneous applications.
This paper considers crowded massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communications over a Rician fading channel, where the number of users is much greater than the number of available pilot sequences. A joint user identification and line-of-sight (LOS) component derivation algorithm is proposed without requiring a threshold. Based on the derived LOS component, we design a LOS-only channel estimator and an updated channel estimator.
Radar sensing will be integrated into the 6G communication system to support various applications. In this integrated sensing and communication system, a radar target may also be a communication channel scatterer. In this case, the radar and communication channels exhibit certain joint burst sparsity. We propose a two-stage joint pilot optimization, target detection and channel estimation scheme to exploit such joint burst sparsity and pilot beamforming gain to enhance detection/estimation performance. In Stage 1, the base station (BS) sends downlink pilots (DP) for initial target search, and …
In this paper, we propose a joint pilot design and channel estimation scheme based on the deep learning (DL) technique for multiuser multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) channels. To this end, we construct a pilot designer using two-layer neural networks (TNNs) and a channel estimator using deep neural networks (DNNs), which are jointly trained to minimize the mean square error (MSE) of channel estimation. To effectively reduce the interference among the multiple users, we also use the successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique in the channel estimation process. The numerical result…
This paper considers an Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenario in which devices sporadically transmit short packets with few pilot symbols over a fading channel. Devices are characterized by unique transmission non-idealities, such as I/Q imbalance. The number of pilots is generally insufficient to obtain an accurate estimate of the end-to-end channel, which includes the effects of fading and of the transmission-side distortion. This paper proposes to tackle this problem by using meta-learning. Accordingly, pilots from previous IoT transmissions are used as meta-training data in order to train a de…
This paper proposes a flexible pilot assignment method to jointly optimize the uplink and downlink data transmission in multi-cell Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with correlated Rayleigh fading channels. By utilizing a closed-form expression of the ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) achieved with maximum ratio processing, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the minimum weighted sum of the uplink and downlink SEs subject to the transmit powers and pilot assignment sets. This combinatiorial optimization problem is solved by two sequential algorithms: a heuris…
Pilot contamination is a limiting factor in multicell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems because it can severely impair channel estimation. Prior works have suggested coordinating pilot design across cells in order to reduce the channel estimation error caused by pilot contamination. In this paper, we propose a method for coordinated pilot design using fractional programming to minimize the weighted mean squared-error (MSE) in channel estimation. In particular, we apply the recently proposed quadratic transform to the MSE expression which allows the effect of pilot contamina…
Pilot contamination in the uplink (UL) can severely degrade the channel estimation quality at the base station (BS) in a massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system. Thus, it is critical to explore all possible avenues to enable more orthogonal resources for the users to transmit non-interfering UL pilots. In conventional designs, pilot orthogonality typically assumes constant channel gains over time, which limits the amount of orthogonal resources in the case of time-selective channels. To circumvent this constraint, in this paper, we show how to enable orthogonal multiplexing of pilots in…
