Number Of Base Station Antennas Research Articles

A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning-Based Grant-Free Random Access Protocol for mMTC Massive MIMO Networks

The expected huge number of connected devices in Internet of Things (IoT) applications characterizes the massive machine-type communication (mMTC) scenario, one prominent use case of beyond fifth-generation (B5G) systems. To meet mMTC connectivity requirements, grant-free (GF) random access (RA) protocols are seen as a promising solution due to the small amount of data that MTC devices usually transmit. In this paper, we propose a GF RA protocol based on a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach, applied to aid IoT devices in selecting the least congested RA pilots. The rewards obtained by the devices in collision cases resemble the congestion level of the chosen pilot. To enable the operation of the proposed method in a realistic B5G network scenario and aiming to reduce signaling overheads and centralized processing, the rewards in our proposed method are computed by the devices taking advantage of a large number of base station antennas. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of latency, network throughput, and per-device throughput compared with other protocols.

Enhancing 6G network security: GANs for pilot contamination attack detection in massive MIMO systems

Accurate channel estimation at the base station (BS) is crucial for reliable, high-throughput communication in massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. However, the process of estimating channel matrices in massive MIMO systems is prone to pilot contamination attacks. These attacks not only degrade the efficiency of channel estimation but also increase the probability of information leakage. In this paper, a method is being proposed for detecting pilot contamination signals using a deep learning model, namely a generative adversarial network (GAN), at the BS of a massive MIMO system. GAN comprises two interconnected models, the first model is the generator, which creates synthetic samples, and the second model is the discriminator, which distinguishes between real and generator-generated samples. Residual block-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) like ResNet and reverse ResNet are implemented as discriminator model of GAN for improving the detection of pilot-contaminated signals. The generator, structured as an autoencoder, generates artificial data resembling real data from noisy signals. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively identifies the pilot-contaminated attacks; this effectiveness is evaluated through performance matrices called accuracy and loss function. Furthermore, the performance of the model is observed by varying the number of BS antennas and pilot lengths.

A Neural Network-Based Random Access Protocol for Crowded Massive MIMO Systems.

Fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks are expected to serve large numbers of user equipments (UEs). Grant-based random access (RA) protocols are efficient when serving human users, typically with large data volumes to transmit. The strongest user collision resolution (SUCRe) is the first protocol that effectively uses the many antennas at the 5G base station (BS) to improve connectivity performance. In this paper, our proposal involves substituting the retransmission rule of the SUCRe protocol with a neural network (NN) to enhance the identification of the strongest user and resolve collisions in a decentralized manner on the UEs' side. The proposed NN-based procedure is trained offline, admitting different congestion levels of the system, aiming to obtain a single setup able to operate with different numbers of UEs. The numerical results indicate that our method attains substantial connectivity performance improvements compared to other protocols without requiring additional complexity or overhead. In addition, the proposed approach is robust regarding variations in the number of BS antennas and transmission power while improving energy efficiency by requiring fewer attempts on the RA stage.

Beamforming Array Antenna Technique Based on Partial Update Adaptive Algorithms

The most important issues for improving the performance of modern wireless communication systems are interference cancellation, efficient use of energy, improved spectral efficiency and increased system security. Beamforming Array Antenna (BAA) is one of the efficient methods used for this purpose. Full band BAA, on the other hand, will suffer from a large number of controllable elements, a long convergence time and the complexity of the beamforming network. Since no attempt had previously been made to use Partial Update (PU) for BAA, the main novelty and contribution of this paper was to use PU instead of full band adaptive algorithms. PU algorithms will connect to a subset of the array elements rather than all of them. As a result, a common number of working antennas for the system's entire cells can be reduced to achieve overall energy efficiency and high cost-effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a new architectural model that employs PU adaptive algorithms to control and minimize the number of phase shifters, thereby reducing the number of base station antennas. We will concentrate on PU LMS (Least Mean Square) algorithms such as sequential-LMS, M-max LMS, periodic-LMS, and stochastic-LMS. According to simulation results using a Uniform Linear Array (ULA) and three communications channels, the M-max-LMS, periodic LMS, and stochastic LMS algorithms perform similarly to the full band LMS algorithm in terms of square error, tracking weight coefficients, and estimation input signal, with a quick convergence time, low level of error signal at steady state and keeping null steering's interference-suppression capability intact.

A power method based user selection for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted multiuser massive MISO systems

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have recently emerged as effective solutions for providing massive connectivity. However, an effective RIS user selection method that can support massive devices remains undeveloped. In this study, a power method (PM)-based RIS user selection algorithm for RIS-assisted massive multiple-input multiple-output systems is proposed. It is proven that minimizing the condition number (CN) of the aggregated downlink channel matrix results in the same performance as maximizing the sum rate. Based on this analysis, a PM-based RIS user selection algorithm that utilizes a CN as an RIS user selection metric is proposed here. Although the complexity of conventional user selection algorithm is proportional to the square of the number of base station (BS) antennas ( M 2 ), that of the proposed algorithm is linearly proportional to the number of BS antennas ( M ). Simulation results demonstrate that, under a practical RIS control link, the proposed PMUS algorithm achieves better performance and lower complexity than the conventional user selection algorithm.

LSTM-GRU Model-Based Channel Prediction for One-Bit Massive MIMO System

In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to estimate the channel matrix for a massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system with a one-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In the literature, various DL methods were proposed to estimate the channel matrix; however, they were limited to a small range of noise levels. We are driven to break the data appropriately so that the estimation performance improves with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) because the primary premise is that the DL model should perform better in the case of higher SNR. We suggested breaking the received signal into sequences to consider the entire system as multiple sub-systems, where each antenna serves the same number of users considered as a sub-system. Consequently, the model trained the data received by each sub-system sequentially. However, the conventional back-propagation with extensive training, because of the large number of base station (BS) antennas, causes a vanishing gradient, leading to training failure. Hence, we combine long short-term memory (LSTM) with gated recurrent units (GRU) to accelerate the training speed of the network under the hypothesis that LSTM effectively processes MIMO data and overcomes the vanishing gradient problem, whereas GRU accelerates the convergence rate. The results show that our model outperforms other methods at different SNRs and various numbers of BS antennas.

Optimal Energy Signal Design for Multiuser MISO WPCNs With Non-Linear Energy Harvesting Circuits

The optimal energy signal design for wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) enabling energy-sustainable communication for a large number of low-power devices is still an open problem in practical systems. In this work, we study a multi-user WPCN, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) sends an energy signal to multiple single-antenna users, which, in turn, harvest energy from the received signal and utilize it for information transmission in the uplink. In contrast to the existing works on multiple-input single-output (MISO) WPCN design, in this paper, we jointly optimize the energy signal waveform and downlink beamforming at the BS for energy harvesting (EH) devices described by non-linear circuit-based models. To this end, we assume that the BS broadcasts a pulse-modulated signal employing multiple energy signal vectors and we formulate an optimization problem for the joint design of the downlink transmit energy signal vectors, their number, the durations of the transmit pulses, and the time allocation policy for minimization of the average transmit power at the BS. We show that for single-user WPCNs, a single energy signal vector, which is collinear with the maximum ratio transmission (MRT) vector and drives the EH circuit at the user device into saturation, is optimal. Next, for the general multi-user case, we show that the optimal signal design requires a maximum number of energy signal vectors that exceeds the number of users by one and propose an algorithm to obtain the optimal energy signal vectors. Since the complexity of the optimal design is high, we also propose two suboptimal schemes for WPCN design. First, for asymptotic massive WPCNs, where the ratio of the number of users to the number of BS antennas, i.e., the system load, tends to zero, we show that the optimal downlink transmit signal can be obtained in closed-form and comprises a sequence of weighted sums of MRT vectors. Next, based on this result, for general WPCNs with finite system loads, we propose a suboptimal closed-form MRT-based design and a suboptimal semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based scheme. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed optimal scheme and suboptimal SDR-based design achieve nearly identical performance and outperform two baseline schemes, which are based on linear and sigmoidal EH models. Furthermore, we show that, if the system load of the WPCN is low, the performance gap between the proposed suboptimal solutions is small and becomes negligible as the number of BS antennas tends to infinity.

Analysis of scalable channel estimation in FDD massive MIMO

One of the key ideas for reducing downlink channel acquisition overhead for FDD massive MIMO systems is to exploit a combination of two assumptions: (i) the dimension of channel models in propagation domain may be much smaller than the next-generation base-station array sizes (e.g., 64 or more antennas), and (ii) uplink and downlink channels may share the same low-dimensional propagation domain. Our channel measurements demonstrate that the two assumptions may not always hold, thereby impacting the predicted performance of methods that rely on the above assumptions. In this paper, we analyze the error in modeling the downlink channel using uplink measurements, caused by the mismatch from the above two assumptions. We investigate how modeling error varies with base-station array size and provide both numerical and experimental results. We observe that modeling error increases with the number of base-station antennas, and channels with larger angular spreads have larger modeling error. Utilizing our modeling error analysis, we then investigate the resulting beamforming performance rate loss. Accordingly, we observe that the rate loss increases with the number of base-station antennas, and channels with larger angular spreads suffer from higher rate loss.

Structured channel covariance estimation from limited samples for large antenna arrays

In massive multiuser multiple antenna systems, the knowledge of the users’ channel covariance matrix is crucial for minimum mean square error channel estimation in the uplink and it plays an important role in several multiuser beamforming schemes in the downlink. Due to the large number of base station antennas, accurate covariance estimation is challenging especially in the case where the number of samples is limited and thus comparable to the channel vector dimension. As a result, the standard sample covariance estimator may yield a too large estimation error which in turn may yield significant system performance degradation with respect to the ideal channel covariance knowledge case. To address such problem, we propose a method based on a parametric representation of the channel angular scattering function. The proposed parametric representation includes a discrete specular component which is addressed using the well-known MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) method, and a diffuse scattering component, which is modeled as the superposition of suitable dictionary functions. To obtain the representation parameters, we propose two methods, where the first solves a nonnegative least-squares problem and the second maximizes the likelihood function using expectation–maximization. Our simulation results show that the proposed methods outperform the state of the art with respect to various estimation quality metrics and different sample sizes.

Rethinking WMMSE: Can Its Complexity Scale Linearly With the Number of BS Antennas?

Precoding design for maximizing weighted sum-rate (WSR) is a fundamental problem for downlink of massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. It is well-known that this problem is generally NP-hard due to the presence of multi-user interference. The weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) algorithm is a popular approach for WSR maximization. However, its computational complexity is cubic in the number of base station (BS) antennas, which is unaffordable when the BS is equipped with a large antenna array. In this paper, we consider the WSR maximization problem with either a sum-power constraint (SPC) or per-antenna power constraints (PAPCs). For the former, we prove that any nontrivial stationary point must have a low-dimensional subspace structure, and then propose a reduced-WMMSE (R-WMMSE) with linear complexity by exploiting the solution structure. For the latter, we propose a linear-complexity WMMSE approach, named PAPC-WMMSE, by using a novel recursive design of the algorithm. Both R-WMMSE and PAPC-WMMSE have simple closed-form updates and guaranteed convergence to stationary points. Simulation results verify the efficacy of the proposed designs, especially the much lower complexity as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches for massive MU-MIMO systems.

Direct Conversion of Hybrid Precoding and Combining From Full Array Architecture to Subarray Architecture for mmWave MIMO Systems

Hybrid precoding and combining for millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with subarray (SA) architecture is a promising technology for 6G because of their low complexity, cost, and power consumption compared to the full array (FA) architecture. This paper proposes an iterative algorithm for designing hybrid precoding and combining for the SA architecture. It is called direct conversion of iterative hybrid precoding and combining from FA to SA (DCIFS). The proposed algorithm involves an iterative process that begins by designing a hybrid precoding and combining matrix for the FA structure and then converts it into an SA matrix by setting certain entries to zero while achieving better performance. It does not depend on the antenna array geometry, unlike other techniques such as the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) hybrid precoding and combining approach. We investigate the proposed algorithm with two scenarios. In the first scenario, we use the proposed DCIFS scheme only at the base station (BS) and the iterative FA hybrid scheme at the mobile station (MS), whereas in the second, we use the proposed DCIFS scheme at both the BS and the MS. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design approach achieves a spectral efficiency comparable to that of the FA hybrid design counterpart, especially for a large system, while maintaining low complexity. For example, when SNR= 0 dB and the number of transmitted streams ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N_s</i> ) = 2, the proposed algorithm provides about 1.5 bps/Hz spectral efficiency gain compared to the OMP hybrid design for the first scenario. Moreover, when the number of iterations is low and the number of BS antenna and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N_s</i> is high, the proposed approach outperforms the conventional SA hybrid design in terms of spectral efficiency with the same hardware complexity.

Antenna Array Topologies for mmWave Massive MIMO Systems: Spectral Efficiency Analysis

This article investigates the achievable spectral efficiency (SE) of millimeter wave massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with three different array topologies deployed at the base station (BS), namely uniform rectangular array (URA), uniform linear array (ULA) or uniform circular array (UCA). To be practical, both small scale fading and large scale path loss, and shadowing effects are considered in the analysis. A 3D channel model taking both the azimuth and elevation domains into account is adopted for the analysis of the URA and UCA topologies. Considering randomly distributed users in the cell, we firstly deduce the distribution functions of the distances between the users and the BS, and the azimuth and elevation angles of departure, respectively. Based on the derived probability distribution, tight approximations on the achievable SE with maximum ration transmission under the three antenna array topologies are derived. Analytical results show that under all the three topologies, the total achievable SE increases with the number of BS antennas, but decreases with the radius of cell and decay exponent. Moreover, it converges to a saturated value in the high SNR regime and a large inter-element spacing. It is also found that the UCA configuration has a superior achievable SE than the URA and ULA cases, and thus is the best choice for mmWave massive MIMO systems in terms of the achievable SE.

Energy and spectral efficiency improvement using improved shark smell‐coyote optimization for massive MIMO system

SummaryMassive multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) can considerably enhance the “spectral efficiency and energy efficiency” since it is a major technique for future wireless networks. Thus, the performance needs a huge count of base station antennas to serve a smaller number of terminals in conventional MIMO methodology. Large‐scale radio frequency (RF) chains represent the large‐scale antennas. There is a need of implementing an effective massive MIMO system for maximizing the efficient performance of the system with high “spectral efficiency and energy efficiency” owing to the high cost of RF chains, and the higher power consumption. In this paper, a massive MIMO communication system is implemented to satisfy the requirements regarding “energy efficiency and spectral efficiency.” Here, the number of base station antennas, the transmit power, and beam forming vectors are optimized to maximize “energy efficiency and spectral efficiency” when the channel capacity is known to be higher than some threshold values. The novelty of this work is a new hybrid optimization adaptive shark smell‐coyote optimization (ASS‐CO) algorithm is developed for improving energy efficiency. The optimization is done with the help of the hybrid optimization ASS‐CO Algorithm. The proposed ASS‐CO algorithm‐based massive MIMO communication system is evaluated by experimental analysis. From the result analysis, the maximum resource efficiency is observed by SS‐WOA, which is 6.6%, 50%, 6.6%, 6.6%, and 6.6% maximized than rider optimization algorithm (ROA), spotted hyena optimization (SHO), lion algorithm (LA), Shark Smell Optimization (SSO), and Coyote Optimization Algorithm (COA) by taking the count of base stations as 4. The superior performance enhancement regarding “spectral efficiency and energy efficiency” is accomplished over the traditional systems.

Multicarrier technique for 5G massive MIMO system based on CDMA and CMFB

Filterbank multicarrier (FBMC) is an effective method for modulation over massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in the future fifth generation wireless networks. This multicarrier technique provides high spectral efficiency, and it is resilient against synchronization errors compared to the well-known orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technique. This paper introduces a new technique, that combines the Code-division multiple-access (CDMA) and cosine modulated filter banks, a specific class of FBMC, to massive MIMO communication systems. In the proposed technique, the data symbols are transmitted on different sub-bands and also, they are spread in each sub-band by CDMA code. The proposed technique reduces the interference between data symbols, which consequently improves bit-error-rate (BER) performance. Simulation results show that the overall BER performance of the proposed multicarrier transmission technique is significantly enhanced. The results obtained show that as the number of base station antennas increases, different channel distortions are averaged out, thus BER decreases (in average by 10–2) for the same signal-to-noise ratio.

A Partial Reciprocity-Based Channel Prediction Framework for FDD Massive MIMO With High Mobility

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 the exploitation of the partial channel reciprocity of FDD and the angle-delay-Doppler channel structure. More precisely, the base station (BS) estimates the angle-delay-Doppler information of the UL channel based on UL pilots using Matrix Pencil (MP) method. It then computes the wideband JADD precoders according to the extracted parameters. Afterwards, the user estimates and feeds back some scalar coefficients for the BS to reconstruct the predicted DL channel. Asymptotic analysis shows that the CSI prediction error converges to zero when the number of BS antennas and the bandwidth increases. Numerical results with industrial channel model demonstrate that our framework can well adapt to high speed (350 km/h), large CSI delay (10 ms) and channel sample noise.

Analysis and optimization of uplink spectral efficiency in massive multiple-input and multiple-output

Fifth Generation (5G) specifications aims for data rate of 1 Gbps in high mobility and 10 Gbps in low mobility conditions, 15-30 bps/Hz of spectral efficiency with less than 1 milli second (ms) latency reduction. Massive multiple-input and multiple-output (Massive MIMO) is one of the promising technologies in 5G standard which offers a high spectral efficiency improvement. This work focus on the uplink scenario spectral efficiency in a Massive MIMO simulation network based on third generation partnership project (3GPP) and long term evolution (LTE) document of 5G. This work analyzes the spectral efficiency metric by simulating the 5G Massive MIMO network. Then, the research identified major constraint parameters; number of user antennas, K, number of base station antennas, M, transmission power, P, channel bandwidth, B, and coherence time, Tau_C and pilot time Tau_P which plays a significant role in varying this metric. The authors focus on improving the spectral efficiency by passing these constraint parameters through different meta-heurestic optimization algorithms, such as, convex optimization solver, White shark optimization (WSO) and Particle swarm optimization (PSO). The results show an overall, 1-10 percent of improvement of the parameter wnen compared with other research articles. The maximum value achieved is 49.84 bps/Hz, which is three times higher as per to the 3GPP and International Telecommunication Unioin (ITU) release document.

Feedback Overhead in the FDD Downlink Massive MIMO System

One of the fundamental problems in massive multiple input multiple output (MMIMO) systems based on the frequency division duplexing (FDD) mode is the acquisition of the channel state information at the base station (BS). Indeed, in these systems, the reciprocity of the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) channels is not applicable. Thus, the users are supposed, after having estimated their subchannels, to feedback them to the BS. Since the size of the information to be returned is proportional to the number of base station antennas that is very large, then we witness an excess of the number to be returned for each user. It is therefore essential to find a way to reduce this quantity, which affects the overall performance of the system. In this article, we propose two new MMIMO-OFDM-FDD-DL schemas based on the Givens rotation quantization used in the 802.11ac standard to reduce the amount of information to be returned for each user. The first is a fusion between the Givens rotation (GR) and the arithmetic coding (AC) technique, and the second is based on the combination of the GR method and the universal compression technique, Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW). The proposed schemes named GR &amp; AC and GR &amp; LZW (with an improvement of this proposal based on a modified version of LZW (LZWM) named GR &amp; LZWM) for the first and second, respectively, are compared and both can achieve a compression ratio of up to 95% (or even 98%) and 83%, considerably exceeding recent advanced techniques.

On the Sum Capacity Achieving Precoders and Their CSI Requirements for MIMO-BC

Dirty paper coding (DPC) precoders achieve the sum capacity of Gaussian MIMO broadcast channels. However, most systems employ zero-forcing (ZF) and MMSE precoders that are near-optimal at high SNR if the base station (BS) has a large number of antennas, but achievable sum rates with ZF and MMSE precoders are significantly below sum capacity otherwise. We show that capacity achieving DPC precoding requires CSI that scales only as <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(M^{2})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -antenna user (not full CSI as is generally assumed) irrespective of the number of BS antennas. Moreover, easily computable generalized decision feedback equalizers significantly outperform MMSE and ZF precoders.

Achievable Rate and Energy Efficiency Analysis of Multiuser Relay-Aided Massive MIMO Downlink

In this article, the achievable sum rate and the energy efficiency (EE) are investigated for a multiuser relay-aided massive multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) downlink. Low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) are equipped at both the base station (BS) and the relay station (RS), and the amplify-and-forward protocol is adopted at the RS. Under the Rician fading channel, closed-form approximate expressions for the achievable sum rate are derived with perfect and imperfect channel state information. A more general power law is extracted to save transmit power without reducing the achievable sum rate, and a local optimal power allocation scheme is proposed to improve the channel capacity of active users. Then, the tradeoff between the achievable sum rate and the EE is discussed. The numerical results show that, due to the quantization noise, the transmit power has a limited increase in the achievable rate. In addition, it is more valuable to improve the DAC quantization bit at the RS when the number of BS antennas is larger than that of RS antennas. In addition, under strong line-of-sight channels or high pilot transmit power conditions, the channel estimation accuracy is higher, and the best tradeoff between the achievable sum rate and the EE can be obtained when the DAC quantization bit is 4.

Downlink channel analysis at multi-cell massive MIMO: novel adaptive channel allocation scheme

In large multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, we offer a new access strategy for crowd situations. Crowd situations include a high number users who have intermittent access patterns, making orthogonal scheduling impossible. In this paper, the work is driven by the massive MIMO problem at crowded environment. The pilot contamination problem is dependent on the protocol assumptions is observed in the system. We investigate a crowd situation in which the users number and their access behaviours make scheduling broadcasts impossible. The pilot assignment is time-slot randomized, but the data portion is repeated, allowing it to use successive-interference-cancellation across copies of comparable packets. In result analysis, the transmission of downlink to the user has shown with changing the number of users, fading effect, transmission power and the number of base station antennas.