In a frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, the acquisition of downlink channel state information (CSI) at base station (BS) is a very challenging task due to the overwhelming overheads required for downlink training and uplink feedback. In this paper, we reveal a deterministic uplink-to-downlink mapping function when the position-to-channel mapping is bijective. Motivated by the universal approximation theorem, we then propose a sparse complex-valued neural network (SCNet) to approximate the uplink-to-downlink mapping function. Different from general deep networks that operate in the real domain, the SCNet is constructed in the complex domain and is able to learn the complex-valued mapping function by off-line training. After training, the SCNet is used to directly predict the downlink CSI based on the estimated uplink CSI without the need of either downlink training or uplink feedback. Numerical results show that the SCNet achieves better performance than general deep networks in terms of prediction accuracy and exhibits remarkable robustness over complicated wireless channels, demonstrating its great potential for practical deployments.
One challenge for FDD massive MIMO communication system is how to obtain the downlink channel state information (CSI) at the base station. Except for traditional codebook feedback through uplink pilot transmission, some channel reciprocity properties can be utilized through uplink channel estimation and channel parameter estimation algorithms. In this paper, the uplink and downlink channel reciprocity properties are analyzed. It is theoretically proved that not all multipath parameters for FDD downlink and uplink channels are equivalent. Therefore, the so called full reciprocity property does …
Efficient channel state information at transmitter (CSIT) for frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO can facilitate its backward compatibility with existing FDD cellular networks. To date, several CSIT estimation schemes have been proposed for FDD single-cell massive MIMO systems, but they fail to consider inter-cell-interference (ICI) and suffer from downlink pilot contamination in multi-cell scenario. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a compressive sensing (CS)-based CSIT estimation scheme to combat ICI in FDD multi-cell massive MIMO systems. Specifically, angle-domain massive…
Transmitter channel state information (CSIT) is indispensable for the spectral efficiency gains offered by massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In a frequency-division-duplexing (FDD) massive MIMO system, CSIT is typically acquired through downlink channel estimation and user feedback, but as the number of antennas increases, the overhead for CSI training and feedback per user grows, leading to a decrease in spectral efficiency. In this paper, we show that, using uplink pilots in FDD, the downlink sum spectral efficiency gain with perfect downlink CSIT is achievable when the …
In order to unlock the full advantages of massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) in the downlink, channel state information (CSI) is required at the base station (BS) to optimize the beamforming matrices. In frequency division duplex (FDD) systems, full channel reciprocity does not hold, and CSI acquisition generally requires downlink pilot transmission followed by uplink feedback. Prior work proposed the end-to-end design of pilot transmission, feedback, and CSI estimation via deep learning. In this work, we introduce an enhanced end-to-end design that leverages partial uplink-downlink…
When operating massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) channels at different frequencies (frequency division duplex (FDD) operation), acquisition of channel state information (CSI) for downlink precoding is a major challenge. Since, barring transceiver impairments, both UL and DL CSI are determined by the physical environment surrounding transmitter and receiver, it stands to reason that, for a static environment, a mapping from UL CSI to DL CSI may exist. First, we propose to use various neural network (NN)-based approaches that learn this mapp…
In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based low-complexity approach for downlink (DL) channel estimation (CE) in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. In contrast to existing work, we use training data which solely stems from the uplink (UL) domain. This allows to learn the CNN centralized at the base station (BS). After training, the network parameters are offloaded to mobile terminals (MTs) within the coverage area of the BS. The MTs can then obtain channel state information (CSI) of the MIMO channels with the low-complexity CNN estimator. This circumvents the nece…
Wireless backhaul is considered to be the key part of the future wireless network with dense small cell traffic and high capacity demand. In this paper, we focus on the design of a high spectral efficiency line-of-sight (LoS) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system for millimeter wave (mmWave) backhaul using dual-polarized frequency division duplex (FDD). High spectral efficiency is very challenging to achieve for the system due to various physical impairments such as phase noise (PHN), timing offset (TO) as well as the poor condition number of the LoS MIMO. In this paper, we propose a ho…
We consider downlink channel training of a frequency division duplex (FDD) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system when a multi-antenna jammer is present in the network. The jammer intends to degrade mean square error (MSE) of the downlink channel training by designing an attack based on second-order statistics of its channel. The channels are assumed to be spatially correlated. First, a closed-form expression for the channel estimation MSE is derived and then the jammer determines the conditions under which the MSE is maximized. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed jam…
In this paper, we consider user selection and downlink precoding for an over-loaded single-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in frequency division duplexing (FDD) mode, where the base station is equipped with a dual-polarized uniform planar array (DP-UPA) and serves a large number of single-antenna users. Due to the absence of uplink-downlink channel reciprocity and the high-dimensionality of channel matrices, it is extremely challenging to design downlink precoders using closed-loop channel probing and feedback with limited spectrum resource. To address these issues, a…
This paper proposes a model-driven deep learning-based downlink channel reconstruction scheme for frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. The spatial non-stationarity, which is the key feature of the future extremely large aperture massive MIMO system, is considered. Instead of the channel matrix, the channel model parameters are learned by neural networks to save the overhead and improve the accuracy of channel reconstruction. By viewing the channel as an image, we introduce You Only Look Once (YOLO), a powerful neural network for object detection, …
When base stations (BSs) are deployed with multiple antennas, they need to have downlink (DL) channel state information (CSI) to optimize downlink transmissions by beamforming. The DL CSI is usually measured at mobile stations (MSs) through DL training and fed back to the BS in frequency division duplexing (FDD). The DL training and uplink (UL) feedback might become infeasible due to insufficient coherence time interval when the channel rapidly changes due to high speed of MSs. Without the feedback from MSs, it may be possible for the BS to directly obtain the DL CSI using the inherent relatio…
Cell-free massive MIMO communications is an emerging network technology for 5G wireless communications wherein distributed multi-antenna access points (APs) serve many users simultaneously. Most prior work on cell-free massive MIMO systems assume time-division duplexing mode, although frequency-division duplexing (FDD) systems dominate current wireless standards. The key challenges in FDD massive MIMO systems are channel-state information (CSI) acquisition and feedback overhead. To address these challenges, we exploit the so-called angle reciprocity of multipath components in the uplink and do…
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is believed to deliver unrepresented spectral efficiency gains for 5G and beyond. However, a practical challenge arises during its commercial deployment, which is known as the ``curse of mobility''. The performance of massive MIMO drops alarmingly when the velocity level of user increases. In this paper, we tackle the problem in frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO with a novel Channel State Information (CSI) acquisition framework. A joint angle-delay-Doppler (JADD) wideband precoder is proposed for channel training. Our idea consists in th…
We investigate the joint uplink-downlink configuration of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) for multi-user frequency-division-duplexing (FDD) and time-division-duplexing (TDD) systems. This is motivated in FDD since uplink and downlink transmissions occur simultaneously and hence an IRS must be jointly configured for both transmissions. In TDD, while a joint design is not strictly necessary, it can significantly reduce feedback overhead, power consumption, and configuration periods associated with updating the IRS. To compute the trade-off between uplink and downlink rates achieved by a …
We derive novel bounds for the performance of algorithms that estimate the downlink covariance matrix from the uplink covariance matrix in frequency division duplex (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The focus is on algorithms that use estimates of the angular power spectrum as an intermediate step. Unlike previous results, the proposed bounds follow from simple arguments in possibly infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces, and they do not require strong assumptions on the array geometry or on the propagation model. Furthermore, they are suitable for the analysis of set-t…
A massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, operating in Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) mode of operation, suffers from prohibitively high overhead associated with downlink channel state information (CSI) acquisition and downlink precoding, due to the lack of uplink/downlink channel reciprocity. In this paper, a heuristic edge-weighted vertex-coloring based pattern division (EWVC-PD) scheme is proposed to alleviate the overhead of a two-layer precoding approach, in a practical scenario where the user clusters undergo serious angular-spreading-range (ASR) overlapping. Specifical…
We consider high-dimensional MIMO transmissions in frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems. For precoding, the frequency selective channel has to be measured, quantized and fed back to the base station by the users. When the number of antennas is very high this typically leads to prohibitively high quantization complexity and large feedback. In 5G New Radio (NR), a modular quantization approach has been applied for this, where first a low-dimensional subspace is identified for the whole frequency selective channel, and then subband channels are linearly mapped to this subspace and quantized…
The acquisition of channel state information (CSI) in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) massive MIMO has been a formidable challenge. In this paper, we address this problem with a novel CSI feedback framework enabled by the partial reciprocity of uplink and downlink channels in the wideband regime. We first derive the closed-form expression of the rank of the wideband massive MIMO channel covariance matrix for a given angle-delay distribution. A low-rankness property is identified, which generalizes the well-known result of the narrow-band uniform linear array setting. Then we propose a partial …
State Key Lab of Intelligent Technologies and Systems（智能技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）；State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学轨道交通控制与安全国家重点实验室）
Artificial intelligence (AI) based downlink channel state information (CSI) prediction for frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems has attracted growing attention recently. However, existing works focus on the downlink CSI prediction for the users under a given environment and is hard to adapt to users in new environment especially when labeled data is limited. To address this issue, we formulate the downlink channel prediction as a deep transfer learning (DTL) problem, where each learning task aims to predict the downlink CSI from the uplink CS…
Massive MIMO has been the subject of intense interest in both academia and industry for the past few years. 3GPP standardization for cellular systems have adopted the principles of massive MIMO and categorized the use of large rectangular planar arrays at the base station as full-dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO) to operate in both TDD and FDD. Operating a large antenna array base station requires the system to overcome several implementation challenges caused by hardware impairments making practical solutions non-ideal and expensive to deploy at scale. It is important to learn from existing challenges…
Designing beamforming techniques for the downlink (DL) of frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO is known to be a challenging problem due to the difficulty of obtaining channel state information (CSI). Indeed, since the uplink-downlink bands are disjoint, the system cannot rely on channel reciprocity to estimate the channel from uplink (UL) pilots as in time division duplexing (TDD) system. Still, in this paper, we propose original designs for robust beamformers that do not require any feedback from the users and only rely on the transmission of UL pilots. The price to pay is that the be…
We propose a method for channel training and precoding in FDD massive MIMO based on deep neural networks (DNNs), exploiting Downlink (DL) channel covariance knowledge. The DNN is optimized to maximize the DL multi-user sum-rate, by producing a pre-beamforming matrix based on user channel covariances that maps the original channel vectors to effective channels. Measurements of these effective channels are received at the users via common pilot transmission and sent back to the base station (BS) through analog feedback without further processing. The BS estimates the effective channels from rece…
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) communications are one of the enabling technologies of 5G and beyond networks. While prior work indicates that mMIMO networks employing time division duplexing have a significant capacity growth potential, deploying mMIMO in frequency division duplexing (FDD) networks remains problematic. The two main difficulties in FDD networks are the scalability of the downlink reference signals and the overhead associated with the required uplink feedback for channel state information (CSI) acquisition. To address these difficulties, most existing methods uti…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Channel state information (CSI) feedback is necessary for the frequency division duplexing (FDD) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems due to the channel non-reciprocity. With the help of deep learning, many works have succeeded in rebuilding the compressed ideal CSI for massive MIMO. However, simple CSI reconstruction is of limited practicality since the channel estimation and the targeted beamforming design are not considered. In this paper, a jointly optimized network is introduced for channel estimation and feedback so that a spectral-efficient beamformer can be learned. Moreover, …
Can we map the channels at one set of antennas and one frequency band to the channels at another set of antennas---possibly at a different location and a different frequency band? If this channel-to-channel mapping is possible, we can expect dramatic gains for massive MIMO systems. For example, in FDD massive MIMO, the uplink channels can be mapped to the downlink channels or the downlink channels at one subset of antennas can be mapped to the downlink channels at all the other antennas. This can significantly reduce (or even eliminate) the downlink training/feedback overhead. In the context o…
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems require downlink channel state information (CSI) at the base station (BS) to better utilize the available spatial diversity and multiplexing gains. However, in a frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO system, CSI feedback overhead degrades the overall spectral efficiency. Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based CSI feedback compression schemes has received a lot of attention recently due to significant improvements in compression efficiency; however, they still require reliable feedback links to convey the compressed CSI information …
A large majority of cellular networks deployed today make use of Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) where, in contrast with Time Division Duplexing (TDD), the channel reciprocity does not hold and explicit downlink (DL) probing and uplink (UL) feedback are needed in order to achieve spatial multiplexing gain. To support massive MIMO, the overhead incurred by conventional DL probing and UL feedback schemes scales linearly with the number of BS antennas and, therefore, may be very large. In this paper, we present a new approach to achieve a very competitive trade-off between spatial multiplexing…
The knowledge of the downlink (DL) channel spatial covariance matrix at the BS is of fundamental importance for large-scale array systems operating in frequency division duplexing (FDD) mode. In particular, this knowledge plays a key role in the DL channel state information (CSI) acquisition. In the massive MIMO regime, traditional schemes based on DL pilots are severely limited by the covariance feedback and the DL training overhead. To overcome this problem, many authors have proposed to obtain an estimate of the DL spatial covariance based on uplink (UL) measurements. However, many of these…
In this paper, we analyze the benefits of including downlink pilots in a cell-free massive MIMO system. We derive an approximate per-user achievable downlink rate for conjugate beamforming processing, which takes into account both uplink and downlink channel estimation errors, and power control. A performance comparison is carried out, in terms of per-user net throughput, considering cell-free massive MIMO operation with and without downlink training, for different network densities. We take also into account the performance improvement provided by max-min fairness power control in the downlin…
Knowledge of second-order statistics of channels (e.g. in the form of covariance matrices) is crucial for the acquisition of downlink channel state information (CSI) in massive MIMO systems operating in the frequency division duplexing (FDD) mode. Current MIMO systems usually obtain downlink covariance information via feedback of the estimated covariance matrix from the user equipment (UE), but in the massive MIMO regime this approach is infeasible because of the unacceptably high training overhead. This paper considers instead the problem of estimating the downlink channel covariance from upl…
Channel state information (CSI) feedback is critical for frequency division duplex (FDD) massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. Most conventional algorithms are based on compressive sensing (CS) and are highly dependent on the level of channel sparsity. To address the issue, a recent approach adopts deep learning (DL) to compress CSI into a codeword with low dimensionality, which has shown much better performance than the CS algorithms when feedback link is perfect. In practical scenario, however, there exists various interference and non-linear effect. In this article, we design a D…
In this work, we propose a joint adaptive codebook construction and feedback generation scheme in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. Both unsupervised and supervised deep learning techniques are used for this purpose. Based on a recently discovered equivalence of uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) channel state information (CSI) in terms of neural network learning, the codebook and associated deep encoder for feedback signaling is based on UL data only. Subsequently, the feedback encoder can be offloaded to the mobile terminals (MTs) to generate channel feedback there as efficiently as possib…
Channel estimation for the downlink of frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO systems is well known to generate a large overhead as the amount of training generally scales with the number of transmit antennas in a MIMO system. In this paper, we consider the solution of extrapolating the channel frequency response from uplink pilot estimates to the downlink frequency band, which completely removes the training overhead. We first show that conventional estimators fail to achieve reasonable accuracy. We propose instead to use high-resolution channel estimation. We derive theoretical lower b…
We consider timing and frequency synchronization for the massive multiuser (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink where 1-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) are used at the base station (BS). We focus on the practically relevant scenario in which orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used to communicate over frequency-selective channels. Our contributions are twofold. First, we use Bussgang's theorem to analyze the impact on performance caused by timing and frequency offsets in the presence of 1-bit DACs at the BS. Second, we demonstrate the efficacy of the wid…
We propose a strategy for orthogonal downlink pilot assignment in cell-free massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) that exploits knowledge of the channel state information, the channel hardening degree at each user, and the mobility conditions for the users. These elements, properly combined together, are used to define a user pilot utility metric, which measures the user's real need of a downlink pilot for efficient data decoding. The proposed strategy consists in assigning orthogonal downlink pilots only to the users having a pilot utility metric exceeding a predetermined threshold. I…
This paper shows that deep neural network (DNN) can be used for efficient and distributed channel estimation, quantization, feedback, and downlink multiuser precoding for a frequency-division duplex massive multiple-input multiple-output system in which a base station (BS) serves multiple mobile users, but with rate-limited feedback from the users to the BS. A key observation is that the multiuser channel estimation and feedback problem can be thought of as a distributed source coding problem. In contrast to the traditional approach where the channel state information (CSI) is estimated and qu…
Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system where all the access points (APs) cooperate to coherently serve all the user equipments (UEs), suppress inter-cell interference and mitigate the multiuser interference. Recent works demonstrated that, unlike co-located Massive MIMO, the \textit{channel hardening} is, in general, less pronounced in cell-free Massive MIMO, thus there is much to benefit from estimating the downlink channel. In this study, we investigate the gain introduced by the downlink beamforming training, extending the previou…
