While scalable cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) shows advantages in static conditions, the impact of its changing serving access point (AP) set in a mobile network is not yet addressed. In this paper we first derive the CPU cluster and AP handover rates of scalable CF-mMIMO as exact numerical results and tight closed form approximations. We then use our closed form handover rate result to analyse the mobility-aware throughput. We compare the mobility-aware spectral efficiency (SE) of scalable CF-mMIMO against distributed MIMO with pure network- and UE-centric AP selection, for different AP densities and handover delays. Our results reveal an important trade-off for future dense networks with low control delay: under moderate to high mobility, scalable CF-mMIMO maintains its advantage for the 95th-percentile users but at the cost of degraded median SE.
This paper studies the impact of mobility on the power consumption of wireless networks. With increasing mobility, we show that the network should dedicate a non negligible fraction of the useful rate to estimate the different degrees of freedom. In order to keep the rate constant, we quantify the increase of power required for several cases of interest. In the case of a point to point MIMO link, we calculate the minimum transmit power required for a target rate and outage probability as a function of the coherence time and the number of antennas. Interestingly, the results show that there is …
Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) is a flexible and robust multiple access scheme for downlink multi-antenna wireless networks. RSMA relies on multi-antenna Rate-Splitting (RS) at the transmitter and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the receivers. In this work, we study the performance of RSMA under the practical important setup of imperfect Channel State Information at Transmitter (CSIT) originating from user mobility and latency in the network. First, we derive a lower bound on the ergodic sum-rate of RSMA for an arbitrary number of transmit antennas, number of users, user s…
The coupling between cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) carrier frequencies and user mobility is considered in this paper. First of all, a mmWave channel is introduced taking into account the user mobility and the impact of the channel aging. Then, three beamforming techniques are proposed in the considered scenario, along with a dynamic user association technique (handover): starting from a user-centric association between each mobile device and a cluster of access points (APs), a rule for updating the APs cluster is formulate…
The first measured results for massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) performance in a line-of-sight (LOS) scenario with moderate mobility are presented, with 8 users served by a 100 antenna base Station (BS) at 3.7 GHz. When such a large number of channels dynamically change, the inherent propagation and processing delay has a critical relationship with the rate of change, as the use of outdated channel information can result in severe detection and precoding inaccuracies. For the downlink (DL) in particular, a time division duplex (TDD) configuration synonymous with massive MIMO depl…
Mobility and blockage are two critical challenges in wireless transmission over millimeter-wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz) bands. In this paper, we investigate network massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission for mmWave/THz downlink in the presence of mobility and blockage. Considering the mmWave/THz propagation characteristics, we first propose to apply per-beam synchronization for network massive MIMO to mitigate the channel Doppler and delay dispersion effects. Accordingly, we establish a transmission model. We then investigate network massive MIMO downlink transmission …
Macroscopic mobility of wireless users is important to determine the performance and energy effciency of a wireless network, because of the temporal correlations it introduces in the consumed power and throughput. In this work we introduce a methodology that obtains the long time statistics of such metrics in a network. After describing the general approach, we present a specific example of the uplink channel of a mobile user in the vicinity of a massive MIMO base-station antenna array. To guarantee a fixed SINR and rate, the user inverts the path-loss channel power, while moving around in the…
High-speed train (HST) communications with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) techniques have received significant attention in recent years. Besides, cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is considered a promising technology to achieve the ultimate performance limit. In this paper, we focus on the performance of CF massive MIMO-OFDM systems with both matched filter and large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) receivers in HST communications. HST communications with small cell and cellular massive MIMO-OFDM systems are also analyzed for comparison. Considering t…
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology aiming at achieving high spectral efficiency by deploying a large number of base station (BS) antennas using coherent combining. Channel aging due to user mobility is a significant degrading factor of such systems. In addition, cost efficiency of massive MIMO is a prerecuisite for their deployment, that leads to low cost antenna elements inducing high phase noise. Since phase is time-dependent, it contributes to channel aging. For this reason, we present a novel joint channel-phase noise model, that enables us to study the…
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…
Massive MIMO is widely touted as an enabling technology for 5th generation (5G) mobile communications and beyond. On paper, the large excess of base station (BS) antennas promises unprecedented spectral efficiency gains. Unfortunately, during the initial phase of industrial testing, a practical challenge arose which threatens to undermine the actual deployment of massive MIMO: user mobility-induced channel Doppler. In fact, testing teams reported that in moderate-mobility scenarios, e.g., 30 km/h of user equipment (UE) speed, the performance drops up to 50% compared to the low-mobility scenari…
We propose a scalable video broadcasting scheme over MIMO-OFDM systems. The scalable video source layers are channel encoded and modulated into independent signal streams, which are then transmitted from the allocated antennas in certain time-frequency blocks. Each receiver employs the successive group decoder to decode the signal streams of interest by treating other signal streams as interference. The transmitter performs adaptive coding and modulation, and transmission antenna and subcarrier allocation, based on the rate feedback from the receivers. We also propose a hybrid receiver that sw…
Efficient signal detectors are rather important yet challenging to achieve satisfactory performance for large-scale communication systems. This paper considers a non-orthogonal sparse code multiple access (SCMA) configuration for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with recently proposed orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation. We develop a novel low-complexity yet effective customized Memory approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm for channel equalization and multi-user detection. Specifically, the proposed Memory AMP detector enjoys the sparsity of the channel matrix …
In this paper, we apply angle-domain Doppler compensation for high-mobility wideband massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) uplink transmission. The time-varying multipath channel is considered between high-speed terminal and static base station (BS), where multiple Doppler frequency offsets (DFOs) are associated with distinct angle of departures (AoDs). With the aid of the large-scale uniform linear array (ULA) at the transmitter, we design a beamforming network to generate multiple parallel beamforming branches, each transmitting signal pointing to one particular angle. Then, the transmitte…
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 …
Hybrid analog-digital architectures are considered as promising candidates for implementing millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems since they enable a considerable reduction of the required number of costly radio frequency (RF) chains by moving some of the signal processing operations into the analog domain. However, the analog feed network, comprising RF dividers, combiners, phase shifters, and line connections, of hybrid MIMO architectures is not scalable due to its prohibitively high power consumption for large numbers of transmit antennas. Motivated …
Imagine a coverage area with many wireless access points that cooperate to jointly serve the users, instead of creating autonomous cells. Such a cell-free network operation can potentially resolve many of the interference issues that appear in current cellular networks. This ambition was previously called Network MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) and has recently reappeared under the name Cell-Free Massive MIMO. The main challenge is to achieve the benefits of cell-free operation in a practically feasible way, with computational complexity and fronthaul requirements that are scalable to la…
In this work, we consider the downlink of a single-cell multi-user multiple-input multiple-output system in which zero-forcing precoding is used at the base station (BS) to serve a certain number of user equipments (UEs). A fixed data rate is guaranteed at each UE. The UEs move around in the cell according to a Brownian motion, thus the path losses change over time and the energy consumption fluctuates accordingly. We aim at determining the distribution of the energy consumption. To this end, we analyze the asymptotic regime where the number of antennas at the BS and the number of UEs grow lar…
A rapid change of channels in high-speed mobile communications will lead to difficulties in channel estimation and tracking but can also provide Doppler diversity. In this paper, the performance of a multiple-input multiple-output system with pilot-assisted repetition coding and spatial multiplexing is studied. With minimum mean square error (MMSE) channel estimation, an equivalent channel model and the corresponding system model are presented. Based on random matrix theory, asymptotic expressions of the normalized achievable sum rate of the linear receivers, such as the maximal ratio combinin…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of channel aging on the performance of cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with pilot contamination. To take into account the channel aging effect due to user mobility, we first compute a channel estimate. We use it to derive novel closed-form expressions for the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of CF massive MIMO systems with large-scale fading decoding and matched-filter receiver cooperation. The performance of a small-cell system is derived for comparison. It is found that CF massive MIMO systems achieve higher 95\%-li…
In this work, we consider the downlink of a single-cell multi-user MIMO system in which the base station (BS) makes use of $N$ antennas to communicate with $K$ single-antenna user equipments (UEs). The UEs move around in the cell according to a random walk mobility model. We aim at determining the energy consumption distribution when different linear precoding techniques are used at the BS to guarantee target rates within a finite time interval $T$. The analysis is conducted in the asymptotic regime where $N$ and $K$ grow large with fixed ratio under the assumption of perfect channel state inf…
High-mobility adaption and massive Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) application are two primary evolving objectives for the next generation high speed train communication system. In this paper, we consider how to design a location-aware beam-forming for the massive MIMO system.We first analyze the tradeoff between beam directivity and beamwidth, based on which we present the sensitivity analysis of positioning accuracy. Then, we derive the maximum beam directivity and corresponding beamwidth under the restriction of diverse positioning accuracies to guarantee a high efficient transmission…
Large-scale distributed Multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) is a promising wireless network architecture that combines the advantages of "massive MIMO" and "small cells." It consists of several Access Points (APs) connected to a central server via a wired backhaul network and acting as a large distributed antenna system. We focus on the downlink, which is both more demanding in terms of traffic and more challenging in terms of implementation than the uplink. In order to enable multiuser joint precoding of the downlink signals, channel state information at the transmitter side is required. We consider Tim…
Recent works have identified massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) as a key technology for achieving substantial gains in spectral and energy efficiency. Additionally, the turn to low-cost transceivers, being prone to hardware impairments is the most effective and attractive way for cost-efficient applications concerning massive MIMO systems. In this context, the impact of channel aging, which severely affects the performance, is investigated herein by considering a generalized model. Specifically, we show that both Doppler shift because of the users' relative movement as well as phase…
We consider channel estimation for high-speed railway communication systems, where both the transmitter and the receiver are equipped with large-scale antenna arrays. It is known that the throughput of conventional training schemes monotonically decreases with the mobility. Assuming that the moving terminal employs a large linear antenna array, this paper proposes a position-aided channel estimation scheme whereby only a portion of the transmit antennas send pilot symbols and the full channel matrix can be well estimated by using these pilots together with the antenna position information base…
In this paper, we analyze the achievable downlink spectral efficiency of cell-free massive multiple input multiple output (CF-mMIMO) systems, accounting for the effects of channel aging (caused by user mobility) and pilot contamination. We consider two cases, one where user equipments (UEs) rely on downlink pilots beamformed by the access points (APs) to estimate downlink channel, and another where UEs utilize statistical channel state information (CSI) for data decoding. For comparison, we also consider cellular mMIMO and derive its achievable spectral efficiency with channel aging and pilot …
This paper considers the uplink pilot overhead in a time division duplexing (TDD) massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) mobile systems. A common scenario of conventional massive MIMO systems is a Base Station (BS) serving all user terminals (UTs) in the cell with the same TDD frame format that fits the coherence interval of the worst-case scenario of user mobility (e.g. a moving train with velocity 300 Km/s). Furthermore, the BS has to estimate all the channels each time-slot for all users even for those with long coherence intervals. In fact, within the same cell, sensors or pedestria…
We consider the downlink of a MIMO-OFDM wireless systems where the base-station (BS) has M antennas and serves K single-antenna user terminals (UT) with K larger than or equal to M. Users estimate their channel vectors from common downlink pilot symbols and feed back a prediction, which is used by the BS to compute the linear beamforming matrix for the next time slot and to select the users to be served according to the proportional fair scheduling (PFS) algorithm. We consider a realistic physical channel model used as a benchmark in standardization and some alternatives for the channel estima…
An important concept in wireless systems has been quality of experience (QoE)-aware video transmission. Such communications are considered not only connection-based communications but also content-aware communications, since the video quality is closely related to the content itself. It becomes necessary therefore for video communications to utilize a cross-layer design (also known as joint source and channel coding). To provide efficient methods of allocating network resources, the wireless network uses its cross-layer knowledge to perform unequal error protection (UEP) solutions. In this art…
This paper addresses the mobility problem in massive multiple-input multiple-output systems, which leads to significant performance losses in the practical deployment of the fifth generation mobile communication networks. We propose a novel channel prediction method based on multi-dimensional matrix pencil (MDMP), which estimates the path parameters by exploiting the angular-frequency-domain and angular-time-domain structures of the wideband channel. The MDMP method also entails a novel path pairing scheme to pair the delay and Doppler, based on the super-resolution property of the angle estim…
How to meet the demand for increasing number of users, higher data rates, and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) in the beyond fifth-generation (B5G) networks? Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is considered as a promising solution, in which many wireless access points cooperate to jointly serve the users by exploiting coherent signal processing. However, there are still many unsolved practical issues in cell-free massive MIMO systems, whereof scalable massive access implementation is one of the most vital. In this paper, we propose a new framework for structured massive …
In this work, we consider the uplink of a scalable cell-free massive MIMO system where the users are served only by a subset of access points (APs) in the network. The APs are physically grouped into predetermined "cell-centric clusters", which are connected to different cooperative central processing units (CPUs). Given the cooperative nature of the considered communications network, we assume that each user is associated with a "virtual cluster", that, in general, involves some APs belonging to different cell-centric clusters. Assuming the maximum-ratio-combining at the APs, we propose a use…
In future Internet-of-Things networks, sensors or even access points can be mounted on ground/aerial vehicles for smart-city surveillance or environment monitoring. To support the high-mobility sensing with low network latency, a technique called over-the-air-computation (AirComp) was recently developed which enables an access-point to receive a desired function of sensing-data from concurrent-transmissions by exploiting the superposition property of a multi-access-channel. This work aims at further developing AirComp for next-generation multi-antenna multi-modal sensor networks. Specifically,…
We propose a location-aware pilot allocation algorithm for a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network with high-mobility users, where the wireless channels are subject to Rician fading. Pilot allocation in massive MIMO is a hard combinatorial problem and depends on the locations of users. As such, it is highly complex to achieve the optimal pilot allocation in real-time for a network with high-mobility users. Against this background, we propose a low-complexity pilot allocation algorithm, which exploits the behavior of line-of-sight (LOS) interference among the users and allocate …
In this paper, we analyze the performance of the uplink communication of massive multi-cell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems under the effects of pilot contamination and delayed channels because of terminal mobility. The base stations (BSs) estimate the channels through the uplink training, and then use zero-forcing processing to decode the transmit signals from the users. The probability density function (PDF) of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio is derived for any finite number of antennas. From this PDF, we derive an achievable ergodic rate with a finite number of BS …
Unlike the time-division duplexing (TDD) systems, the downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) channels are not reciprocal anymore in the case of frequency-division duplexing (FDD). However, some long-term parameters, e.g. the time delays and angles of arrival (AoAs) of the channel paths, still enjoy reciprocity. In this paper, by efficiently exploiting the aforementioned limited reciprocity, we address the DL channel state information (CSI) feedback in a practical wideband massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system operating in the FDD mode. With orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFD…
This paper studies the transmit power optimization in a multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. To overcome the scalability issue of network-wide max-min fairness (NW-MMF), we propose a novel power control (PC) scheme. This scheme maximizes the geometric mean (GM) of the per-cell max-min spectral efficiency (SE). To solve this new optimization problem, we prove that it can be rewritten in a convex form and then solved using standard tools. To provide a fair comparison with the available utility functions in the literature, we solve the network-wide proportional fairnes…
This paper presents an optimized low-complexity and high-throughput multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal detector core for detecting spatially-multiplexed data streams. The core architecture supports various layer configurations up to 4, while achieving near-optimal performance, as well as configurable modulation constellations up to 256-QAM on each layer. The core is capable of operating as a soft-input soft-output log-likelihood ratio (LLR) MIMO detector which can be used in the context of iterative detection and decoding. High area-efficiency is achieved via algorithmic and architec…
This paper considers a cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) system using conjugate beamforming (CB) with fractional-exponent normalization. Assuming independent Rayleigh fading channels, a generalized closed-form expression for the achievable downlink spectral efficiency is derived, which subsumes, as special cases, the spectral efficiency expressions previously reported for plain CB and its variants, i.e. normalized CB and enhanced CB. Downlink power control is also tackled, and a reduced-complexity power allocation strategy is proposed, wherein only one coefficient for access point (AP) is opti…
This paper is to design and optimize a non-orthogonal and noncoherent massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) framework towards enabling scalable ultra-reliable low-latency communications (sURLLC) in wireless systems beyond 5G. In this framework, the huge diversity gain associated with the large-scale antenna array in massive MIMO systems is leveraged to ensure ultrahigh reliability. To reduce the overhead and latency induced by the channel estimation process, we advocate the noncoherent communication technique which does not need the knowledge of instantaneous channel state information …
This paper presents a statistical block fading channel model for multiuser massive MIMO system. The proposed channel model is evolved from correlation based stochastic channel model (CBSCM) but in addition to the properties of CBSCM, it has capability of capturing channel variations along time or frequency and along space simultaneously. It has a simplified analytical expression, still being able to simulate underlying physical phenomena which otherwise need a complex geometry based stochastic channel model (GBSCM). The channel model is verified with reported measurement data of channel for ma…
In network MIMO systems, channel state information is required at the transmitter side to multiplex users in the spatial domain. Since perfect channel knowledge is difficult to obtain in practice, \emph{limited feedback} is a widely accepted solution. The {\em dynamic number of cooperating BSs} and {\em heterogeneous path loss effects} of network MIMO systems pose new challenges on limited feedback design. In this paper, we propose a scalable limited feedback design for network MIMO systems with multiple base stations, multiple users and multiple data streams for each user. We propose a {\em l…
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks, where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with large number of antennas and serve a number of users simultaneously, are very promising, but suffer from pilot contamination. Despite its importance, delayed channel state information (CSI) due to user mobility, being another degrading factor, lacks investigation in the literature. Hence, we consider an uplink model, where each BS applies zero-forcing decoder, accounting for both effects, but with the focal point on the relative users' movement with regard to the BS antennas. In this setting…
In a recent work, we studied a novel precoding design for cell-free networks called team minimum mean-square error (TMMSE) precoding, which rigorously generalizes centralized MMSE precoding to distributed operations based on transmitter-specific channel state information (CSI). Despite its flexibility in handling different cooperation regimes at the CSI sharing level, TMMSE precoding assumes network-wide sharing of the data bearing signals, and hence it is inherently not scalable. In this work, inspired by recent advances on scalable cell-free architectures based on user-centric network cluste…
