Coherence Blocks Research Articles

Massive MIMO Communication With Intelligent Reflecting Surface

This paper studies the feasibility of deploying intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) in massive multiple input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to improve the performance of users in the service dead zone. One question of paramount importance is as follows: if the overhead of channel training and the computational complexity of algorithm design arising from the huge number of IRS reflecting elements and base station (BS) antennas have to be controlled, can we provide reasonable performance to the users with weak direct channels? This paper provides an affirm answer to this question. Specifically, to reduce the channel training overhead, we consider an appealing protocol for the uplink communication in the IRS-assisted massive MIMO systems. Under this protocol, the IRS reflection coefficients are optimized based on the channel covariance matrices, which are generally fixed for many coherence blocks, to boost the long-term performance. Then, given the IRS reflecting coefficients, the BS beamforming vectors are designed in each coherence block based on the effective channel of each user, which is the superposition of its direct and reflected user-IRS-BS channels, to improve the instantaneous performance. Since merely the user effective channels are estimated in each coherence block, the training overhead of this protocol is the same as that in the legacy wireless systems without IRSs. Moreover, in the asymptotic regime that the numbers of IRS elements and BS antennas both go to infinity with a fixed ratio, we manage to first characterize the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimators of the user effective channels and then quantify the closed-form user achievable rates as functions of channel covariance matrices with channel training overhead and estimation error taken into account. Interestingly, it is shown that the properties of channel hardening and favorable propagation still hold for the user effective channels, and satisfactory user rates are thus achievable even if simple BS beamforming solutions, e.g., maximal-ratio combining, are employed. Finally, thanks to the rate characterization, we design a low-complexity algorithm to optimize the IRS reflection coefficients based on channel covariance matrices.

Channel Estimation for RIS-Aided Multiuser Millimeter-Wave Systems

Channel estimation in the RIS-aided massive multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) wireless communication systems is challenging due to the passive feature of RIS and the large number of reflecting elements that incur high channel estimation overhead. To address this issue, we propose a novel cascaded channel estimation strategy with low pilot overhead by exploiting the sparsity and the correlation of multiuser cascaded channels in millimeter-wave massive MISO systems. Based on the fact that the phsical positions of the BS, the RIS and users may not change in several or even tens of consecutive channel coherence blocks, we first estimate the full channel state information (CSI) including all the angle and gain information in the first coherence block, and then only re-estimate the channel gains in the remaining coherence blocks with much less pilot overhead. In the first coherence block, we propose a two-phase channel estimation method, in which the cascaded channel of one typical user is estimated in Phase I based on the linear correlation among cascaded paths, while the cascaded channels of other users are estimated in Phase II by utilizing the partial CSI of the common base station (BS)-RIS channel obtained in Phase I. The total theoretical minimum pilot overhead in the first coherence block is $8J-2+(K-1)\left\lceil (8J-2)/L\right\rceil $, where $K$, $L$ and $J$ denote the numbers of users, paths in the BS-RIS channel and paths in the RIS-user channel, respectively. In each of the remaining coherence blocks, the minimum pilot overhead is $JK$. Moreover, the training phase shift matrices at the RIS are optimized to improve the estimation performance.

Throughput-Delay Tradeoffs With Finite Blocklength Coding Over Multiple Coherence Blocks

This paper investigates the performance of wireless systems that employ finite-blocklength channel codes for transmission and operate under queuing constraints in the form of limitations on buffer overflow or delay violation probabilities. A block fading model, in which fading stays constant in each coherence block and changes independently between blocks, is considered. It is assumed that channel coding is performed over multiple coherence blocks. A simple ARQ scheme with error-free feedback without any delay is considered. The channel coding rate with given maximal error probability is considered as the service rate and is incorporated into the effective capacity formulation, which characterizes the maximum constant arrival rate that can be supported under statistical queuing constraints. Performances of variable-rate and fixed-rate transmissions are studied. The optimum error probability for variable-rate and fixed-rate transmissions is shown to be unique. The limiting performance as the number of blocks increases is characterized. The tradeoffs and the interactions between the throughput, the number of coherence blocks over which channel coding is performed, error probabilities, channel coherence duration, and queuing constraints are identified.

Robust Signaling for Bursty Interference.

This paper studies a bursty interference channel, where the presence/absence of interference is modeled by a block-i.i.d. Bernoulli process that stays constant for a duration of T symbols (referred to as coherence block) and then changes independently to a new state. We consider both a quasi-static setup, where the interference state remains constant during the whole transmission of the codeword, and an ergodic setup, where a codeword spans several coherence blocks. For the quasi-static setup, we study the largest rate of a coding strategy that provides reliable communication at a basic rate and allows an increased (opportunistic) rate when there is no interference. For the ergodic setup, we study the largest achievable rate. We study how non-causal knowledge of the interference state, referred to as channel-state information (CSI), affects the achievable rates. We derive converse and achievability bounds for (i) local CSI at the receiver side only; (ii) local CSI at the transmitter and receiver side; and (iii) global CSI at all nodes. Our bounds allow us to identify when interference burstiness is beneficial and in which scenarios global CSI outperforms local CSI. The joint treatment of the quasi-static and ergodic setup further allows for a thorough comparison of these two setups.

Low-Complexity Massive MIMO Subspace Estimation and Tracking From Low-Dimensional Projections

Massive MIMO is a variant of multiuser MIMO, in which the number of antennas $M$ at the base-station is very large. It has been observed that in many realistic propagation scenarios, although the user channel vectors have a very high-dim $M$ , they lie on low-dim subspaces because of their limited angular spread (spatial correlation). This low-dim subspace structure remains stable across several coherence blocks and can be exploited to improve the system performance. In a recent work, we addressed this problem and proposed a very effective novel algorithm referred to as Approximate Maximum-Likelihood (AML), which was formulated as a semi-definite program (SDP). In this paper, we address two problems left open in our previous work, namely, computational complexity and tracking. We propose a new algorithm that is reminiscent of Multiple Measurement Vectors (MMV) problem in Compressed Sensing and prove that it is equivalent to the AML Algorithm for sufficiently dense angular grids. It has also a very low computational complexity and is able to track the sharp transitions in the channel statistics very quickly. We provide numerical simulations to assess the estimation/tracking performance of our proposed algorithm, with a particular emphasis on situations where a direct implementation of the SDP is infeasible in real-time. Our proposed algorithm is of independent interest in applications other than massive MIMO. We provide numerical simulations to compare the performance of our algorithm with that of other related subspace estimation algorithms in the literature.

Jamming Detection in Massive MIMO Systems

This letter considers the physical layer security of a pilot-based massive multiple-input multiple-output (MaMIMO) system in presence of a multi-antenna jammer. We propose a new jamming detection method that makes use of a generalized likelihood ratio test over some coherence blocks. Our proposed method utilizes intentionally unused pilots in the network. The performance of the proposed detector improves by increasing the number of antennas at the base station, the number of unused pilots and also by the number of the coherence blocks that are utilized. Simulation results show that in the MaMIMO regime, perfect detection is achievable even with a small number of unused pilots.

Massive MIMO Pilot Decontamination and Channel Interpolation via Wideband Sparse Channel Estimation

We consider a massive MIMO system based on time division duplexing (TDD) and channel reciprocity, where the base stations (BSs) learn the channel vectors of their users via the pilots transmitted by the users in the uplink (UL). It is well-known that, in the limit of very large number of BS antennas, the system performance is limited by pilot contamination, due to the fact that the same set of orthogonal pilots is reused in multiple cells. In the regime of moderately large number of antennas, another source of degradation is channel interpolation because the pilot signal of each user probes only a limited number of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers, and the channel must be interpolated over the other subcarriers, where no pilot symbol is transmitted. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity algorithm that uses the received UL wideband pilot snapshots in an observation window comprising several coherence blocks (CBs) to obtain an estimate of the angle-delay power spread function (PSF) of the received signal. This is generally given by the sum of the angle-delay PSF of the desired user and the angle-delay PSFs of the copilot users, i.e., the users re-using the same pilot dimensions in other cells/sectors. We propose supervised and unsupervised clustering algorithms to decompose the estimated PSF and isolate the part corresponding to the desired user only. We use this decomposition to obtain an estimate of the covariance matrix of the user wideband channel vector, which we exploit to decontaminate the desired user channel estimate by applying minimum mean squared error (MMSE) smoothing filter, i.e., the optimal channel interpolator in the MMSE sense. We also propose an effective low-complexity approximation/implementation of this smoothing filter. We use numerical simulations to assess the performance of our proposed method, and compare it with other recently proposed schemes that use the same idea of separability of users in the angle-delay domain.

The Streaming-DMT of Fading Channels

We consider the sequential transmission of a stream of messages over a block-fading multi-input-multi-output channel. A new message arrives at the beginning of each coherence block, and the decoder is required to output each message sequentially, after a delay of T coherence blocks. In the special case when T = 1, the setup reduces to the quasi-static fading channel. We establish the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) in the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime, and show that it equals T times the DMT of the quasi-static channel. The converse is based on utilizing the delay constraint to amplify a local outage event associated with a message, globally across all the coherence blocks. This approach appears to be new. We propose two coding schemes that achieve the optimal DMT. The first scheme involves interleaving of messages, such that each message is transmitted across T consecutive coherence blocks. This scheme requires the knowledge of the delay constraint at both the encoder and decoder. Our second coding scheme involves a sequential tree code and is delay universal, i.e., the knowledge of the decoding delay is not required by the encoder. However, in this scheme, we require the coherence block length to increase as log (SNR), in order to attain the optimal DMT. Finally, we discuss the case when multiple messages arrive at uniform intervals within each coherence period. Through a simple example, we exhibit the suboptimality of interleaving and propose another scheme that achieves the optimal DMT.