Downlink Pilot Research Articles

A Framework to Channel Feedback and Reconstruction using Matrix Completion in Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we are interested in the problem of channel feedback and reconstruction in frequency division duplexing (FDD)-based massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We propose a general framework that allows reducing the overhead significantly in the uplink feedback control channel when assuming massive antenna arrays at both ends of the wireless link. We investigate the methods capitalize on matrix completion to reducing the feedback overhead. The fundamental idea of the proposed method is to explore the low-rank structure of the channel for its accurate reconstruction at the transmitterside (Tx) with very few uplink feedback information, using matrix completion technique. The proposed framework consisting of two stages. First, upon reception of downlink pilots, the receiver side (Rx) undersamples either the received pilot data matrix or the estimated channel matrix and feeds back only a fraction of their entries to the Tx, throwing away the remaining ones. Then, under the assumption of reduced scattering propagation, the Tx capitalizes on matrix completion to recover either the downlink pilots or directly reconstruct the downlink channel. We consider two application examples: i) backhauling communication and ii) a multi-user equipment (UE) scenario with perfect andimperfect instantaneous channel knowledge. Due to data/channel undersampling, energy consumption at a receiver can be reduced during the uplink feedback transmission. Simulation results show that, compared to the conventional full-feedback approach, which requires feedback of the entire matrix, the proposed solution can decrease the feedback overload in more than 90% for low-rank channels, while providing good channel estimation accuracy, bit error rate (BER) under maximum ratio transmission (MRT) precoding and goodput.

Performance of In-Band Transmission of System Information in Massive MIMO Systems

We consider transmission of system information in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). This information needs to be reliably delivered to inactive users in the cell without any channel state information at the base station. Downlink transmission entails the use of downlink pilots and a special type of precoding that aims to reduce the dimension of the downlink channel and the pilot overhead, which would otherwise scale with the number of base station antennas. We consider a scenario in which the base station transmits over a small number of coherence intervals, providing little time/frequency diversity. The system information is transmitted with orthogonal space-time block codes to increase reliability and performance is measured using outage rates. Several different codes are compared, both for spatially correlated and uncorrelated channels and for varying amounts of time/frequency diversity. We show that a massive MIMO base station can outperform a single-antenna base station in all considered scenarios.

On the Performance of Multigroup Multicast Cell-Free Massive MIMO

We investigate the performance of a multigroup multicast cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output system where many access points (APs) multicast signals to many groups of users. A distributed conjugate beamforming with short-term power constraint (STPC) policy is proposed to use at the APs. In addition, we propose a new transmission scheme in which the APs beamform pilots so that each user can estimate the effective channel gains for signal detection. The analytical expressions for the per-user net throughputs are derived. The results show that when the number of groups is small, STPC outperforms long-term power constraint used in the literature. Furthermore, at a small number of user groups, the transmission with downlink pilots improves the system performance noticeably.

A Scalable Framework for CSI Feedback in FDD Massive MIMO via DL Path Aligning

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 (OFDM) waveform and assuming frequency-selective fading channels, we propose a scalable framework for the DL pilots design, DL CSI acquisition, and the corresponding CSI feedback in the UL. In particular, the base station (BS) can transmit the FFT-based pilots with the carefully-selected phase shifts. Then the user can rely on the so-called time-domain aggregate channel (TAC) to derive the feedback of reduced imensionality according to either its own knowledge about the statistics of the DL channels or the instruction from the serving BS. We demonstrate that each user can just feed back one scalar number per DL channel path for the BS to recover the DL CSIs. Comprehensive numerical results further corroborate our designs.

No Downlink Pilots Are Needed in TDD Massive MIMO

We consider the Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output downlink with maximum-ratio and zero-forcing processing and time-division duplex operation. To decode, the users must know their instantaneous effective channel gain. Conventionally, it is assumed that by virtue of channel hardening, this instantaneous gain is close to its average and hence that users can rely on knowledge of that average (also known as statistical channel information). However, in some propagation environments, such as keyhole channels, channel hardening does not hold. We propose a blind algorithm to estimate the effective channel gain at each user, that does not require any downlink pilots. We derive a capacity lower bound of each user for our proposed scheme, applicable to any propagation channel. Compared with the case of no downlink pilots (relying on channel hardening), and compared with training-based estimation using downlink pilots, our blind algorithm performs significantly better. The difference is especially pronounced in environments that do not offer channel hardening.

Multicell Multiuser Massive MIMO Transmission With Downlink Training and Pilot Contamination Precoding

In this paper, we analyze the spectral efficiency of multicell massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems with downlink training and a new pilot contamination precoding (PCP) scheme. First, we analyze the spectral efficiency of the beamforming training (BT) scheme with maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) precoding. Then, we derive an approximate closed-form expression of the spectral efficiency to find the optimal lengths of uplink and downlink pilots. Simulation results show that the achieved spectral efficiency can be improved due to channel estimation at the user side, but in comparison with a single-cell scenario, the spectral efficiency per cell in multicell scenario degrades because of pilot contamination. We focus on the practical case where the number of base station (BS) antennas is large but still finite and propose the BT and PCP (BT-PCP) transmission scheme to mitigate the pilot contamination with limited cooperation between BSs. We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed BT-PCP scheme with simulation, and we show that the proposed BT-PCP scheme achieves higher spectral efficiency than the conventional PCP method and that the performance gap from the perfect channel state information (CSI) scenario without pilot contamination is small.

Omnidirectional Precoding Based Transmission in Massive MIMO Systems

Common signals in public channels of cellular systems should be transmitted omnidirectionally from the base station (BS) to ensure cell-wide coverage. In this paper, we propose an omnidirectional precoding (OP) based transmission for public channels in massive MIMO systems, which leads to a significant reduction in the downlink pilot overhead while providing omnidirectional signaling. For this OP based transmission, we present three necessary conditions that the OP matrix should satisfy, to meet the requirements for omnidirectional transmission for reliable cell-wide coverage, equal average power on each antenna to sufficiently utilize all the available power amplifier capacities of BS antennas, and achievable ergodic rate maximization for the i.i.d. channel, respectively. Then, several examples of the OP matrix satisfying the three necessary conditions simultaneously are designed by utilizing the Zadoff-Chu sequence and its properties. We also analyze the system performance in terms of achievable ergodic rate, outage probability, and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) for these designs. It is shown that a dedicated design of the OP matrix has the following advantages: 1) it asymptotically maximizes the achievable ergodic rate, maximizes the achievable diversity order, and minimizes the outage probability in the large-scale array regime, not only for the i.i.d. channel, but also for spatially correlated channels; 2) it preserves the PAPR of the transmitted signal after precoding.

Achievable Downlink Rates of MRC and ZF Precoders in Massive MIMO With Uplink and Downlink Pilot Contamination

Massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems require channel state information (CSI) at base stations. In multicell environments, adjacent cells using the same spectrum cause a pilot contamination problem and degrade CSI quality. Under such practical environments, it is important to assess achievable rate of the system for a proper system design. There exist achievable rate bounds of uplink (UL) systems in the literature, but general closed-form rate bounds for downlink (DL) systems are not available yet. This paper studies a practical massive MIMO DL system with or without pilot-aided coherent detection under the scenario of pilot contamination, and derives closed-form approximate achievable DL rate expressions for both maximum ratio combining (MRC) and zero forcing (ZF) precoders. For the case with DL pilot, a corresponding DL effective channel estimator is also developed. Numerical simulation results corroborate accuracy of the closed-form rate expressions and they also show performance characteristics of pilot-contaminated massive MIMO DL systems with MRC and ZF precoders.

Spatially Common Sparsity Based Adaptive Channel Estimation and Feedback for FDD Massive MIMO

This paper proposes a spatially common sparsity based adaptive channel estimation and feedback scheme for frequency division duplex based massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, which adapts training overhead and pilot design to reliably estimate and feed back the downlink channel state information (CSI) with significantly reduced overhead. Specifically, a nonorthogonal downlink pilot design is first proposed, which is very different from standard orthogonal pilots. By exploiting the spatially common sparsity of massive MIMO channels, a compressive sensing (CS) based adaptive CSI acquisition scheme is proposed, where the consumed time slot overhead only adaptively depends on the sparsity level of the channels. In addition, a distributed sparsity adaptive matching pursuit algorithm is proposed to jointly estimate the channels of multiple subcarriers. Furthermore, by exploiting the temporal channel correlation, a closed-loop channel tracking scheme is provided, which adaptively designs the nonorthogonal pilot according to the previous channel estimation to achieve an enhanced CSI acquisition. Finally, we generalize the results of the multiple-measurement-vectors case in CS and derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound of the proposed scheme, which enlightens us to design the nonorthogonal pilot signals for the improved performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms its counterparts, and it is capable of approaching the performance bound.

Downlink Pilot Reduction for Massive MIMO Systems via Compressed Sensing

This letter addresses a problem of downlink pilot allocation for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. When a massive MIMO is employed in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems, significant amount of radio resources are dedicated to the transmission of downlink pilots. Such huge pilot overhead leads to a substantial loss in the maximum data throughput, which motivates us to reduce the number of pilots. In this letter, we propose a pilot reduction strategy based on compressed sensing techniques for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. The pilots are randomly located in a low density manner over the time and frequency domain. To estimate the channels with such low density pilots, we propose a novel sparse channel estimation technique that exploits the common support of the consecutive channel impulse responses over the certain time duration. The evaluation shows that for a massive MIMO with 128 antennas, the proposed scheme achieves significant reduction of pilot overhead, while maintaining good channel estimation performance.

Improvement of LTE Downlink Channel Estimation Performance by Using an Adaptive Pilot Pattern

This paper proposes an adaptive pilot pattern to improve channel estimation performance for LTE downlink system with high mobility. The downlink pilot positions are predefined in the time and frequency domain with fixed pilot pattern in LTE standard. However, that pilot structure is not efficient in a fast time varying channel, and leads to a decrease of channel estimation performance. The authors propose and evaluate the performance of LTE downlink channel estimation using an adaptive pilot scheme to optimally use pilot tones over time varying channels. It is shown that only seven bits of additional wide-band feedback per frame and per user are required to optimally support adaptive pilot pattern. Simulation results show that the proposed method allows high performance in terms of throughput and channel estimation error. This analysis shows that LTE downlink throughput could be increased over 4%.

Pilot Contamination Elimination for Large-Scale Multiple-Antenna Aided OFDM Systems

Pilot contamination constitutes a particularly significant impairment in large-scale multi-cell systems. We propose an effective pilot contamination elimination scheme for multi-cell time division duplexing based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems, by carefully designing a sophisticated amalgam of downlink (DL) training and ‘scheduled’ uplink (UL) training. During the DL training stage, each base station (BS) transmits the DL pilot symbols (PSs) to its mobile stations (MSs) for them to estimate their frequency-domain channel transfer functions (FDCHTFs), which are then embedded in the UL PSs by ‘predistorting’ the PSs with the estimated FDCHTFs. During the scheduled UL training, each BS's UL receiver in turn extracts the FDCHTFs of its MSs from their received PSs by eliminating the pilot contamination imposed by the simultaneously transmitted UL PSs of all other cells. Our simulation results demonstrate that the pilot contamination is completely eliminated by the proposed scheme, even for the network consisting of a large number of unity frequency reuse cells. Most significantly, unlike many existing pilot contamination reduction schemes, our scheme does not rely on the assumption that each BS knows the second-order statistics of all the interfering UL channels.

Pilots Precoding Scheme for Massive MIMO System

There is difficult to acquire channel state information in massive MU-MIMO system. A downlink pilots precoding scheme I s proposed for efficient channel estimation. With the scheme, the BS precodes the pilot sequences and forwards to all users. The channel estimation overhead of this scheme does not depend on the number of BS antennas, and is only proportional to the number of users. We then derive several precoding techniques which enables us to implement the proposed scheme. Finally in simulation the proposed algorithm is compared with conventional algorithms without precoding training in spectral efficiency. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better than the existing schemes.

Frequency estimation for the downlink of the TD-SCDMA system over frequency flat Rician fast fading channels

In this paper, a new frequency estimation scheme is proposed for the downlink of Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) system over frequency flat Rician fast fading channels. The proposed algorithm exploits the synchronous downlink sequence of the downlink pilot time slot in the sub-frame, and takes account of the case where the carrier frequency offset (CFO) and the Doppler shift coexist. The new approach first presents the second-order and fourth-order statistics of the signals which contain unknown CFO, unknown Rician fading coefficients with the Doppler shift, and additive white Gaussian noise. Then, by flexible parameters setting and concrete mathematical operations for above statistics, a new closed-form expression for frequency estimation (the CFO and the Doppler shift) is derived. The simulation results are finally provided to illustrate the accuracy and reliability of the proposed method within the expectative frequency estimation range.

Self-Optimization of Pilot Power in Enterprise Femtocells Using Multi objective Heuristic

Deployment of a large number of femtocells to jointly provide coverage in an enterprise environment raises critical challenges especially in future self-organizing networks which rely on plug-and-play techniques for configuration. This paper proposes a multi-objective heuristic based on a genetic algorithm for a centralized self-optimizing network containing a group of UMTS femtocells. In order to optimize the network coverage in terms of handled load, coverage gaps, and overlaps, the algorithm provides a dynamic update of the downlink pilot powers of the deployed femtocells. The results demonstrate that the algorithm can effectively optimize the coverage based on the current statistics of the global traffic distribution and the levels of interference between neighboring femtocells. The algorithm was also compared with the fixed pilot power scheme. The results show over fifty percent reduction in pilot power pollution and a significant enhancement in network performance. Finally, for a given traffic distribution, the solution quality and the efficiency of the described algorithm were evaluated by comparing the results generated by an exhaustive search with the same pilot power configuration.

Channel State Information Feedback with Zero-Overhead in Closed-Loop MIMO System

Dramatic gains in channel capacity can be achieved in the closed-loop MIMO system under the assumption that the base station (BS) can acquire the downlink channel state information (CSI) accurately. However, transmitting CSI with high precision is a heavy burden that wastes a lot of uplink bandwidth, while transmitting CSI within a limited bandwidth leads to the degradation of system performance. To address this problem, we propose a zero-overhead downlink CSI feedback scheme based on the hybrid pilot structure. The downlink CSI is contained in the hybrid pilots at mobile terminal (MT) side, fed back to BS via the uplink pilot channel, and recovered from hybrid pilot at BS side. Meanwhile the uplink channel is estimated based on the hybrid pilot at BS side. Since transmitting the hybrid pilots occupies the same bandwidth as transmitting traditional code division multiplexing based uplink pilots, no extra uplink channel bandwidth is occupied. Therefore, the overhead for downlink CSI feedback is zero. Moreover, the hybrid pilots are formed at MT side by superposing the received analog downlink pilots directly on the uplink pilots. Thus the downlink CSI estimation process is unnecessary at MT side, and MT's complexity can be reduced. Numerical Simulations prove that, the proposed downlink CSI feedback has the higher precision than the traditional feedback schemes while the overhead for downlink CSI feedback is zero.

Downlink Assisted Uplink Zero Forcing for TDD Multiuser MIMO Systems

This paper proposes practical coordinated linear transmit-receive processing schemes for the uplink (UL) of multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in the time division duplex (TDD) mode. The base station (BS) computes the transmission parameters in a centralized manner and employs downlink (DL) pilot signals to convey the information of the beam selection and beamformers to be used by the terminals. When coexisting with the DL transmit-receive zero forcing, the precoded DL demodulation pilots can be reused for UL beam allocation so that no additional pilot overhead is required. Furthermore, the locally available channel state information (CSI) of the effective MIMO channel is sufficient for the terminals to perform transmit power and rate allocation independently. In order to reduce the UL pilot overhead as well, we propose reusing the precoded UL demodulation pilots in turn for partial CSI sounding. The achievable sum rate of the system is evaluated in time-varying fading channels and with channel estimation. According to the results, the proposed UL transmission strategy provides increased rates compared to single-user MIMO transmission combined with user selection as well as to UL antenna selection transmission, without being sensitive to CSI uncertainty.

Remote Control of Transmit Beamforming for Multiuser TDD/MIMO Systems

This paper proposes a new control scheme in which the base station (BS) controls terminal's transmit beamforming in time-division duplex (TDD)/multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. In the proposed scheme, the BS transmits pilot signals using appropriate downlink beams, to instruct a terminal on target transmit beamforming. Using responses of the downlink pilot signals, the terminal can perform transmit beamforming close to the target one. Our theoretical investigation reveals that the BS can control multiple terminals' transmit beamforming simultaneously. Furthermore, an efficient signal processing at the terminal is investigated to obtain precise weight of transmit beamforming in noise environments. Numerical results show that the terminal can perform precise transmit beamforming close to the target one in noise environments. It is also shown that the amount of downlink control signalling in the proposed scheme is much less than that in codebook-based approach.

Pilot Interference Cancellation Technology for CDMA Cellular Networks

This paper considers the link-level and network-level performance of code division multiple access (CDMA) pilot interference cancellation (pilot IC) technology, a low-complexity advanced receiver technology being considered for use in commercial third generation (3G) CDMA cellular systems. The concept behind this technology is to estimate and cancel at the handset receiver the interference effects associated with CDMA downlink pilot signals broadcast from the base stations of the network. The canceling of interference at the receiver improves the signal-to-interference/noise ratio (SINR), which enables increased cell capacity or throughput. In this paper, we derive SINR expressions for evaluating the probability of error performance of both the RAKE and pilot IC handset receivers, under conventional random spreading code assumptions. The approach can easily and accurately model a wide variety of transmitter, channel, and receiver conditions, including the effects of channel estimation. We also utilize radio network simulations to illustrate and quantify the capacity gains available for 3G CDMA networks through the use of pilot IC handsets. Network simulations are also used to examine the reduced level of soft-handoff found to be possible in pilot IC-based networks and the increased flexibility available in setting pilot power levels. We further consider the impact of using stronger pilot signals for improving the demodulation performance of sensitive higher-order modulation constellations that are needed to support spectrally efficient high-rate data services.