Accessibility statement

Low Complexity Precoding for the Massive MIMO Downlink

In Massive MIMO systems, the base station (BS) is equipped with a large number of low power-consuming antennas (up to hundreds), thus can improve cell coverage and provide much higher data rates than traditional MIMO systems with only several transmit antennas. Taking advantage of the increasing number of transmit antennas, we can further exploit spatial information (especially channel orthogonality of different users), which means that focused beams can be simultaneously transmitted to a multiplicity of terminals, namely multi-user beamforming (MUBF). Most of the existing precoding/beamforming schemes have unacceptable computational complexity for real time processing when the number of antennas is large. At the same time, some methods with comparatively lower complexity, e.g. matched filter (MF), have significant performance loss.

The purpose of this research is to design low complexity precoding schemes for the downlink of Massive MIMO systems. We aim to develop precoding schemes that are practical in terms of computation cost and complexity (which is a function of the number of antennas at BS) and retain acceptable performances, e.g., capacity and quality of service (QoS) concerns. Several scenarios are taken into consideration to make this research more meaningful. The users in the system may use one or more antennas for data transmission. Besides, RF hardware impairment, which stems from different RF hardware configuration for transmitter and receiver at both BS and user equipment, is also considered in the design of precoding schemes.

Members

  • Wence Zhang
  • Rodrigo C de Lamare

Dates

  • Start: September 2013

Research