Backscatter communication (BC) is a promising technique for future Internet-of-Things (IoT) owing to its low complexity, low cost, and potential for energy-efficient operation in sensor networks. There are several network infrastructure setups that can be used for BC with IoT nodes. One of them is the bistatic setup where typically there is a need for high dynamic range and high-resolution analog-to-digital converters at the reader. In this paper, we investigate a bistatic BC setup with multiple antennas. We propose a novel transmission scheme, which includes a protocol for channel estimation at the carrier emitter (CE) as well as a transmit beamformer construction that suppresses the direct link interference between the two ends of a bistatic link (namely CE and reader), and increases the detection performance of the backscatter device (BD) symbol. Further, we derive a generalized log-likelihood ratio test (GLRT) to detect the symbol/presence of the BD. We also provide an iterative algorithm to estimate the unknown parameters in the GLRT. Finally, simulation results show that the required dynamic range of the system is significantly decreased, and the detection performance of the BD symbol is increased, by the proposed algorithm compared to a system not using beamforming at the CE.

Distributed antennas must be phase-calibrated (phase-synchronized) for certain operations, such as reciprocity-based joint coherent downlink beamforming, to work. We use rigorous signal processing tools to analyze the accuracy of calibration protocols that are based on over-the-air measurements between antennas, with a focus on scalability aspects for large systems. We show that (i) for some who-measures-on-whom topologies, the errors in the calibration process are unbounded when the network grows; and (ii) despite that conclusion, it is optimal - irrespective of the topology - to solve a single calibration problem for the entire system and use the result everywhere to support the beamforming. The analyses are exemplified by investigating specific topologies, including lines, rings, and two-dimensional surfaces.

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology for next-generation communication systems. This work proposes a novel partially coherent (PC) transmission framework to cope with the challenge of phase misalignment among the access points (APs), which is important for unlocking the full potential of cell-free massive MIMO technology. With the PC operation, the APs are only required to be phase-aligned within clusters. Each cluster transmits the same data stream towards each user equipment (UE), while different clusters send different data streams. We first propose a novel algorithm to group APs into clusters such that the distance between two APs is always smaller than a reference distance ensuring the phase alignment of these APs. Then, we propose new algorithms that optimize the combining at UEs and precoding at APs to maximize the downlink sum data rates. We also propose a novel algorithm for data stream allocation to further improve the sum data rate of the PC operation. Numerical results show that the PC operation using the proposed framework with a sufficiently small reference distance can offer a sum rate close to the sum rate of the ideal fully coherent (FC) operation that requires network-wide phase alignment. This demonstrates the potential of PC operation in practical deployments of cell-free massive MIMO networks.

In distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, multiple geographically separated access points (APs) communicate simultaneously with a user, leveraging the benefits of multi-antenna coherent MIMO processing and macro-diversity gains from the distributed setups. However, time and frequency synchronization of the multiple APs is crucial to achieve good performance and enable joint precoding. In this paper, we analyze the synchronization requirement among multiple APs from a reciprocity perspective, taking into account the multiplicative impairments caused by mismatches in radio frequency (RF) hardware. We demonstrate that a phase calibration of reciprocity-calibrated APs is sufficient for the joint coherent transmission of data to the user. To achieve synchronization, we propose a novel over-the-air synchronization protocol, named BeamSync, to calibrate the geographically separated APs without sending any measurements to the central processing unit (CPU) through fronthaul. We show that sending the synchronization signal in the dominant direction of the channel between APs is optimal. Additionally, we derive the optimal phase and frequency offset estimators. Simulation results indicate that the proposed BeamSync method enhances performance by 3 dB when the number of antennas at the APs is doubled. Moreover, the method performs well compared to traditional beamforming techniques.

Facing the upcoming era of Internet-of-Things and connected intelligence, efficient information processing, computation, and communication design becomes a key challenge in large-scale intelligent systems. Recently, Over-the-Air (OtA) computation has been proposed for data aggregation and distributed computation of functions over a large set of network nodes. Theoretical foundations for this concept exist for a long time, but it was mainly investigated within the context of wireless sensor networks. There are still many open questions when applying OtA computation in different types of distributed systems where modern wireless communication technology is applied. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of the OtA computation principle and its applications in distributed learning, control, and inference systems, for both server-coordinated and fully decentralized architectures. Particularly, we highlight the importance of the statistical heterogeneity of data and wireless channels, the temporal evolution of model updates, and the choice of performance metrics, for the communication design in OtA federated learning (FL) systems. Several key challenges in privacy, security, and robustness aspects of OtA FL are also identified for further investigation.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a specular technology that can assist the terrestrial base stations. However, the battery limitation of UAV inhibits the system performance by decreasing the overall lifespan of coverage provided by the UAV, driving the necessity of replacement and recharging. Thus, the energy-depleted UAV must be returned to a charging station and be replaced by a fully charged UAV to increase the service span. Therefore, this paper presents a novel framework of UAV replacement to maintain coverage continuity in a UAV-assisted wireless communication system when a serving UAV runs out of energy. Our objective during this replacement process is to maximize the minimum achievable throughput to the UAV-served ground users by jointly optimizing the three-dimensional (3D) multi-UAV trajectory and resources allocated to the users from the individual UAVs. The formulated problem is non-convex for which an efficient algorithm based on successive convex approximation and alternating optimization is proposed. Numerical results provide insights into the UAV trajectories and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to the existing benchmark schemes.

An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a cost and energy-efficient solution to improve wireless system performance. Transmit antenna selection (AS) harnesses the benefits of multiple antennas with a smaller number of radio frequency (RF) chains. We focus on joint optimization of antenna subset and transmit beamforming at the transmitter (Tx) and passive beamforming at the IRS to maximize the receive signal power. We derive a closed-form optimal AS rule for a Tx and receiver (Rx) equipped with single RF chain each and ideal IRS. We analyze its performance with a correlated channel model and then extend it to non-ideal IRS. We also propose a simpler rule that significantly reduces the number of computations and pilots. For an Rx that performs maximal ratio combining, we propose a manifold optimization algorithm and a low-complexity selection rule. For a Tx with multiple RF chains, we propose a subset selection algorithm that yields a locally optimal solution and an alternating optimization algorithm that reduces complexity. Our simulations study the impact of estimation errors, discrete phase shifts, and channel correlation on the proposed selection rules, which perform better than the existing AS rules. They also show that the proposed low-complexity rules are near-optimal.

Future wireless networks are expected to support ubiquitous extended reality (XR) with human-to-human communications. XR is a term that refers to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables, where the X represents any current or future spatial computing technology. XR includes augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR) that all are immersive at different levels and entail distinct degrees of sensory inputs. The ultra-high resolution, detailed representation, panoramic scenery, and multi-stimuli of XR provide a unique immersive experience, allowing users to interact within an alternative world. Transmitting XR video, with its ultra-high bit rate and low latency, presents critical challenges to wireless networking.

The emerging concept of Over-the-Air (OtA) computation has shown great potential for achieving resource-efficient data aggregation across large wireless networks. However, current research in this area has been limited to the standard many-to-one topology, where multiple nodes transmit data to a single receiver. In this letter, we address the problem of applying OtA computation to scenarios with multiple receivers, and propose a novel communication design that exploits joint precoding and decoding over multiple time slots. To determine the optimal precoding and decoding vectors, we formulate an optimization problem that aims to minimize the mean squared error of the desired computations while satisfying the unbiasedness condition and power constraints. Our proposed multi-slot design is shown to be effective in saving communication resources (e.g., time slots) and achieving smaller estimation errors compared to the baseline approach of separating different receivers over time.

Antenna arrays can be either reciprocity calibrated (R-calibrated), which facilitates reciprocity-based beamforming, or fully calibrated (F-calibrated), which additionally facilitates transmission and reception in specific physical directions. We first expose, to provide context, the fundamental principles of over-the-air R-and F-calibration of distributed arrays. We then describe a new method for calibration of two arrays that are individually F-calibrated, such that the combined array becomes jointly F-calibrated.

Digital differentiators enable the computation of the derivative of a continuous-time signal at discrete time instances, and they are used in many signal processing applications. This paper derives a unified filter order estimate for digital differentiators that are realized with linear-phase finite-length impulse response filters and designed in the minimax sense. The estimate is useful at the high-level system design when assessing the implementation complexity and it enables fewer designs when finding the minimal filter order required to satisfy a prescribed tolerable approximation error. The proposed unified estimate covers both wideband and lowpass differentiators of integer degrees up to ten. Furthermore, degree-individual filter order estimates are derived which improve and extend previous results. The performance of both the unified and degree-individual order estimates is evaluated through simulation examples and compared with previous estimates.

The usage of passive intelligent surface (PIS) is emerging as a low-cost green alternative to massive antenna systems for realizing high-energy beamforming (EB) gains. Considering the limited computational capability and constant-envelope precoding for PIS, we propose three novel low-complexity passive EB designs for optimizing the efficacy of PIS-assisted energy transfer (PET) from a multiantenna power beacon (PB) to a single-antenna energy harvesting (EH) user. The first EB design involves solving a univariate equation, and closed forms expressed are presented for the other two. Further, to maximize the practical utility of PET, we introduce a novel channel estimation (CE) protocol for obtaining least-squares estimators for the channels as required for EB designing. Using them, we also derive closed-form expressions for optimal PIS location and optimal time allocation between CE and PET within each coherence block to maximize the users net harvested energy. Numerical results verify the CE analysis and validate the novel analytical bound derived for received power during PET and proposed PIS designs quality against existing benchmarks. We show that the proposed jointly optimal design for PET can yield a significant improvement of about 15 dB, and a reduced active array size at PB can achieve the desired EB gain with sufficient passive elements at PIS. Finally, we also briefly discuss how the proposed CE and EB designs can be extended to the multiuser settings.

Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative machine learning (ML) framework that combines on-device training and server-based aggregation to train a common ML model among distributed agents. In this work, we propose an asynchronous FL design with periodic aggregation to tackle the straggler issue in FL systems. Considering limited wireless communication resources, we investigate the effect of different scheduling policies and aggregation designs on the convergence performance. Driven by the importance of reducing the bias and variance of the aggregated model updates, we propose a scheduling policy that jointly considers the channel quality and training data representation of user devices. The effectiveness of our channel-aware data-importance-based scheduling policy, compared with state-of-the-art methods proposed for synchronous FL, is validated through simulations. Moreover, we show that an "age-aware" aggregation weighting design can significantly improve the learning performance in an asynchronous FL setting.

In the current contribution, we examine the feasibility of fully-energy-autonomous operation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) through wireless energy harvesting (EH) from incident information signals. Towards this, we first identify the main RIS energy-consuming components and present a suitable and accurate energy-consumption model that is based on the recently proposed integrated controller architecture and includes the energy consumption needed for channel estimation. Building on this model, we introduce a novel RIS architecture that enables EH through RIS unit-cell (UC) splitting. Subsequently, we introduce an EH policy, where a subset of the UCs is used for beamsteering, while the remaining UCs absorb energy. In particular, we formulate a subset al.ocation optimization problem that aims at maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver without violating the RISs energy consumption demands. As a problem solution, we present low-complexity heuristic algorithms. The presented numerical results reveal the feasibility of the proposed architecture and the efficiency of the presented algorithms with respect to both the optimal and very high-complexity brute-force approach and the one corresponding to random subset selection. Furthermore, the results reveal how important the placement of the RIS as close to the transmitter as possible is, for increasing the harvesting effectiveness.

Non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data distribution among clients is considered as the key factor that degrades the performance of federated learning (FL). Several approaches to handle non-IID data, such as personalized FL and federated multitask learning (FMTL), are of great interest to research communities. In this work, first, we formulate the FMTL problem using Laplacian regularization to explicitly leverage the relationships among the models of clients for multitask learning. Then, we introduce a new view of the FMTL problem, which, for the first time, shows that the formulated FMTL problem can be used for conventional FL and personalized FL. We also propose two algorithms FedU and decentralized FedU (dFedU) to solve the formulated FMTL problem in communication-centralized and decentralized schemes, respectively. Theoretically, we prove that the convergence rates of both algorithms achieve linear speedup for strongly convex and sublinear speedup of order 1/2 for nonconvex objectives. Experimentally, we show that our algorithms outperform the conventional algorithm FedAvg, FedProx, SCAFFOLD, and AFL in FL settings, MOCHA in FMTL settings, as well as pFedMe and Per-FedAvg in personalized FL settings.

This work proposes novel synchronous, asynchronous, and session-based designs for energy-efficient massive multiple-input multiple-output networks to support federated learning (FL). The synchronous design relies on strict synchronization among users when executing each FL communication round, while the asynchronous design allows more flexibility for users to save energy by using lower computing frequencies. The session-based design splits the downlink and uplink phases in each FL communication round into separate sessions. In this design, we assign users such that one of the participating users in each session finishes its transmission and does not join the next session. As such, more power and degrees of freedom will be allocated to unfinished users, resulting in higher rates, lower transmission times, and hence, higher energy efficiency. In all three designs, we use zero-forcing processing for both uplink and downlink, and develop algorithms that optimize user assignment, time allocation, power, and computing frequencies to minimize the energy consumption at the base station and users, while guaranteeing a predefined maximum execution time of each FL communication round.

When data are available for all nodes of a Gaussian graphical model, then, it is possible to use sample correlations and partial correlations to test to what extent the conditional independencies that encode the structure of the model are indeed verified by the data. In this paper, we give a heuristic rule useful in such a validation process: When the correlation subgraph involved in a conditional independence is balanced (i.e., all its cycles have an even number of negative edges), then a partial correlation is usually a contraction of the corresponding correlation, which often leads to conditional independence. In particular, the contraction rule can be made rigorous if we look at concentration subgraphs rather than correlation subgraphs. The rule is applied to real data for elementary gene regulatory motifs.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and device-to-device (D2D) communication are two promising technologies for improving transmission reliability between transceivers in communication systems. In this paper, we consider the design of reliable communication between the access point (AP) and actuators for a downlink multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) system in the industrial IoT (IIoT) scenario. We propose a two-stage protocol combining IRS with D2D communication so that all actuators can successfully receive the message from AP within a given delay. The superiority of the protocol is that the communication reliability between AP and actuators is doubly augmented by the IRS-aided first-stage transmission and the second-stage D2D transmission. A joint optimization problem of active and passive beamforming is formulated, which aims to maximize the number of actuators with successful decoding. We study the joint beamforming problem for cases where the channel state information (CSI) is perfect and imperfect. For each case, we develop efficient algorithms that include convergence and complexity analysis. Simulation results demonstrate the necessity and role of IRS with a well-optimized reflection matrix, and the D2D network in promoting reliable communication. Moreover, the proposed protocol can enable reliable communication even in the presence of stringent latency requirements and CSI estimation errors.

This letter considers the development of transmission strategies for the downlink of massive multiple-input multiple-output networks, with the objective of minimizing the completion time of the transmission. Specifically, we introduce a session-based scheme that splits time into sessions and allocates different rates in different sessions for the different users. In each session, one user is selected to complete its transmission and will not join subsequent sessions, which results in successively lower levels of interference when moving from one session to the next. An algorithm is developed to assign users and allocate transmit power that minimizes the completion time. Numerical results show that our proposed session-based scheme significantly outperforms conventional non-session-based schemes.

In this paper, two different timing-mismatch compensation strategies for two-channel time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters are comprehensively analyzed and compared. In the first strategy (SA), one channel serves as a reference channel, and the other channel is compensated to match the reference channel using the timing mismatch between the channels. In the second strategy (SB), both channels are compensated to match each other, using half the value of the channel mismatch with different signs. For SB, the paper introduces a novel compensation structure that utilizes parallel differentiator-multiplier (PDM) branches. Expressions for the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) after compensation are derived for both strategies. These expressions reveal that the novel PDM structure achieves a remarkably greater SFDR than the existing cascaded differentiator-multiplier (CDM) compensation structure which can be used for both SA and SB. This is because, after compensation, the remaining aliasing distortion in the proposed PDM structure is shown to be of higher approximation order (in terms of the mismatch value) and thus substantially smaller than in the CDM structure. Simulations included in the paper validate the theoretical results.

As the security of global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) for civilian usage is increasingly important, navigation message authentication (NMA) significantly improves resilience to spoofing attacks. However, not all attacks can be effectively countered: a strong variant of replay/relay attacks, distance-decreasing (DD) attacks, can shorten pseudorange measurements, without manipulating the cryptographically protected navigation message, thus manipulating the position, velocity, and time solution undetected. First, we discuss how DD attacks can tamper with GNSS signals, demonstrating the attack effectiveness on a recorded Galileo signal. DD attacks might introduce bit errors to the forged signals, but the adversary can keep this error rate very low with proper attack parameter settings. Then, based on our mathematical model of the prompt correlator output of the tracking phase at the victim receiver, we find that the correlator output distribution changes in the presence of DD attacks. This leads us to apply hypothesis testing to detect DD attacks, notably a goodness-of-fit (GoF) test and a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), depending on the victims knowledge on the DD attacks. Monte Carlo simulations are used to evaluate the detection probability and the receiver operating characteristic curves for two tests, for different adversary configuration and noise settings. Then, we evaluate the effectiveness of the GoF test and the GLRT with a synthesized DD signal. Both tests can detect DD attacks with similar performance in high-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) environments. The GLRT detection probability is approximately 20% higher than that of the GoF test in low-SNR environments.

We study downlink channel estimation in a multi-cell Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system operating in time-division duplex. The users must know their effective channel gains to decode their received downlink data. Previous works have used the mean value as the estimate, motivated by channel hardening. However, this is associated with a performance loss in non-isotropic scattering environments. We propose two novel estimation methods that can be applied without downlink pilots. The first method is model-based and asymptotic arguments are utilized to identify a connection between the effective channel gain and the average received power during a coherence interval. The second method is data-driven and trains a neural network to identify a mapping between the available information and the effective channel gain. Both methods can be utilized for any channel distribution and precoding. For the model-aided method, we derive all expressions in closed form for the case when maximum ratio or zero-forcing precoding is used. We compare the proposed methods with the state-of-the-art using the normalized mean-squared error and spectral efficiency (SE). The results suggest that the two proposed methods provide better SE than the state-of-the-art when there is a low level of channel hardening, while the performance difference is relatively small with the uncorrelated channel model.

The shape of a surface determines how it interacts with wireless radio-frequency signals. Taking a homogenous metal plate as an example, we can bend and rotate it in different ways to make the incident wireless signal become diffusely or specularly reflected in the desired manner. The same effect can be electronically achieved by using an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), which is a 2D array of metamaterials. By creating heterogeneous impedance variations over the surface, we can synthesize the reflection of a bent and rotated surface but without any mechanical manipulations.

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) provides more uniform spectral efficiency (SE) for users (UEs) than cellular technology. The main challenge to achieve the benefits of cell-free massive MIMO is to realize signal processing in a scalable way. In this paper, we consider scalable full-pilot zero-forcing (FZF), partial FZF (PFZF), protective weak PFZF (PWPFZF), and local regularized ZF (LRZF) combining by exploiting channel statistics. We derive closed-form expressions of the uplink SE for FZF, PFZF, and PWPFZF combining with large-scale fading decoding over independent Rayleigh fading channels, taking channel estimation errors and pilot contamination into account. Moreover, we investigate the impact of the number of pilot sequences, antennas per AP, and APs on the performance. Numerical results show that LRZF provides the highest SE. However, PWPFZF is preferable when the number of pilot sequences is large and the number of antennas per AP is small. The reason is that PWPFZF has lower computational complexity and the SE expression can be computed in closed-form. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of PWPFZF combining with fractional power control and the numerical results show that it improves the performance of weak UEs and realizes uniformly good service for all UEs in a scalable fashion.

We consider Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) spoofing attacks and devise a countermeasure appropriate for mobile GNSS receivers. Our approach is to design detectors that, operating after the signal acquisition, enable the victim receiver to determine with high probability whether it is under a spoofing attack or not. Namely, the binary hypothesis is that either the GNSS receiver tracks legitimate satellite signals, H-0, or spoofed signals, H-1. We assume that there exists an unknown number of multiple spoofers in the environment and the attack strategy (which legitimate signals are spoofed by which spoofers) is not known to the receiver. Based on these assumptions, we propose an algorithm that identifies the number of spoofers and clusters the spoofing data by using Bayesian information criterion (BIC) rule. Depending on the estimated and clustered data we propose a detector, called as generalized likelihood ratio (GLRT)-like detector. We compare the performance of the GLRT-like detector with a genie-aided detector in which the attack strategy and the number of spoofers is known by the receiver. In addition to this, we extend the GLRT-like detector for the case where the noise variance is also unknown and present the performance results.

Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to its potential of interconnecting a large number of heterogeneous wireless devices. However, it is usually challenging to provide reliable and efficient random access control when massive IoT devices are trying to access the network simultaneously. In this article, we investigate methods to introduce intelligent random access management for a massive cellular IoT network to reduce access latency and access failures. Toward this end, we introduce two novel frameworks, namely, local device selection (LDS) and intelligent preamble selection (IPS). LDS enables local communication between neighboring devices to provide cluster-wide cooperative congestion control, which leads to a better distribution of the access intensity under bursty traffics. Taking advantage of the capability of reinforcement learning in developing cooperative multiagent policies, IPS is introduced to enable the optimization of the preamble selection policy in each IoT clusters. To handle the exponentially growing action space in IPS, we design a novel reinforcement learning structure, named branching actor-critic, to ensure that the output size of the underlying neural networks only grows linearly with the number of action dimensions. Simulation results indicate that the introduced mechanism achieves much lower access delays with fewer access failures in various realistic scenarios of interests.

Cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) is an emerging technology for beyond 5G with its promising features such as higher spectral efficiency and superior spatial diversity as compared to conventional multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology. The main working principle of cell-free mMIMO is that many distributed access points (APs) cooperate simultaneously to serve all the users within the network without creating cell boundaries. This paper considers the uplink of a cell-free mMIMO system utilizing the radio stripe network architecture with a sequential fronthaul between the APs. A novel uplink sequential processing algorithm is developed, which is proved to be optimal in both the maximum spectral efficiency (SE) and the minimum mean square error (MSE) sense. A detailed quantitative analysis of the fronthaul requirement or signaling of the proposed algorithm and its comparison with competing sub-optimal algorithms is provided. Key conclusions and implications are summarized in the form of corollaries. Based on the analytical and numerical simulation results, we conclude that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the fronthaul signaling, without compromising the communication performance.

Standard cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) systems is a promising technology to cover the demands for higher data rates in fifth-generation (5G) networks and beyond. These systems assume a large number of distributed access points (APs) using joint coherent transmission to communicate with the users. However, CF mMIMO systems present an increasing computational complexity as the number of users increases. Scalable cell-free CF (SCF) systems have been proposed to face this challenge. Given that the cost-efficient deployment of such large networks requires low-cost transceivers, which are prone to unavoidable hardware imperfections, realistic evaluations of SCF mMIMO systems should take them into account before implementation. Hence, in this work, we focus on the impact of hardware impairments (HWIs) on the SCF mMIMO systems through a general model accounting for both additive and multiplicative impairments. Notably, there is no other work in the literature studying the impact of phase noise (PN) in the local oscillators (LOs) of CF mMIMO systems or in general the impact of any HWIs in SCF mMIMO systems. In particular, we derive upper and lower bounds on the uplink capacity accounting for HWIs. Moreover, we obtain the optimal hardware-aware (HA) partial minimum mean-squared error (PMMSE) combiner. Especially, the lower bound is derived in closed-form using the theory of deterministic equivalents (DEs). Among the interesting findings, we observe that separate LOs (SLOs) outperform a common LO (CLO), and the additive transmit distortion degrades more the performance than the additive receive distortion.

User activity detection in grant-free random access massive machine type communication (mMTC) using pilot-hopping sequences can be formulated as solving a non-negative least squares (NNLS) problem. In this work, two architectures using different algorithms to solve the NNLS problem is proposed. The algorithms are implemented using a fully parallel approach and fixed-point arithmetic, leading to high detection rates and low power consumption. The first algorithm, fast projected gradients, converges faster to the optimal value. The second algorithm, multiplicative updates, is partially implemented in the logarithmic domain, and provides a smaller chip area and lower power consumption. For a detection rate of about one million detections per second, the chip area for the fast algorithm is about 0.7 mm 2 compared to about 0.5 mm 2 for the multiplicative algorithm when implemented in a 28 nm FD-SOI standard cell process at 1 V power supply voltage. The energy consumption is about 300 nJ/detection for the fast projected gradient algorithm using 256 iterations, leading to a convergence close to the theoretical. With 128 iterations, about 250 nJ/detection is required, with a detection performance on par with 192 iterations of the multiplicative algorithm for which about 100 nJ/detection is required.

Future wireless networks need to support massive machine type communication (mMTC) where a massive number of devices accesses the network and massive MIMO is a promising enabling technology. Massive access schemes have been studied for co-located massive MIMO arrays. In this paper, we investigate the activity detection in grant-free random access for mMTC in cell-free massive MIMO networks using distributed arrays. Each active device transmits a non-orthogonal pilot sequence to the access points (APs) and the APs send the received signals to a central processing unit (CPU) for joint activity detection. The maximum likelihood device activity detection problem is formulated and algorithms for activity detection in cell-free massive MIMO are provided to solve it. The simulation results show that the macro diversity gain provided by the cell-free architecture improves the activity detection performance compared to co-located architecture when the coverage area is large.

This paper proposes a flexible pilot assignment method to jointly optimize the uplink and downlink data transmission in multi-cell Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with correlated Rayleigh fading channels. By utilizing a closed-form expression of the ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) achieved with maximum ratio processing, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the minimum weighted sum of the uplink and downlink SEs subject to the transmit powers and pilot assignment sets. This combinatiorial optimization problem is solved by two sequential algorithms: a heuristic pilot assignment is first proposed to obtain a good pilot reuse set and the data power control is then implemented. Numerical results manifest that the proposed algorithm converges fast to a better minimum sum SE per user than the algorithms in previous works.

Cell-free massive MIMO systems consist of many distributed access points with simple components that jointly serve the users. In millimeter wave bands, only a limited set of predetermined beams can be supported. In a network that consolidates these technologies, downlink analog beam selection stands as a challenging task for the network sum-rate maximization. Low-cost digital filters can improve the network sum-rate further. In this work, we propose low-cost joint designs of analog beam selection and digital filters. The proposed joint designs achieve significantly higher sum-rates than the disjoint design benchmark. Supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms can efficiently approximate the input-output mapping functions of the beam selection decisions of the joint designs with low computational complexities. Since the training of ML algorithms is performed off-line, we propose a well-constructed joint design that combines multiple initializations, iterations, and selection features, as well as beam conflict control, i.e., the same beam cannot be used for multiple users. The numerical results indicate that ML algorithms can retain 99-100% of the original sum-rate results achieved by the proposed well-constructed designs.

In this letter, we consider the uplink of a cell-free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network where each user is decoded by a subset of access points (APs). An additional step is introduced in the cell-free Massive MIMO processing: each AP in the uplink locally implements soft MIMO detection and then shares the resulting bit log-likelihoods on the front-haul link. The decoding of the data is performed at the central processing unit (CPU), collecting the data from the APs. The non-linear processing at the APs consists of the approximate computation of the posterior density for each received data bit, exploiting only local channel state information. The proposed method offers good performance in terms of frame-error-rate and considerably lower complexity than the optimal maximum-likelihood demodulator.

In overloaded Massive MIMO (mMIMO) systems, wherein the number K of user equipments (UEs) exceeds the number of base station antennas M, it has recently been shown that non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can increase the sum spectral efficiency. This paper aims at identifying cases where code-domain NOMA can improve the spectral efficiency of mMIMO in the classical regime where K < M. Novel spectral efficiency expressions are provided for the uplink and downlink with arbitrary spreading signatures and spatial correlation matrices. Particular attention is devoted to the planar arrays that are currently being deployed in pre-5G and 5G networks (in sub-6 GHz bands), which are characterized by limited spatial resolution. Numerical results show that mMIMO with such planar arrays can benefit from NOMA in scenarios where the UEs are spatially close to each other. A two-step UE grouping scheme is proposed for NOMA-aided mMIMO systems that is applicable to the spatial correlation matrices of the UEs that are currently active in each cell. Numerical results are used to investigate the performance of the algorithm under different operating conditions and types of spreading signatures (orthogonal, sparse and random sets). The analysis reveals that orthogonal signatures provide the highest average spectral efficiency.

We consider a practical cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system with multi-antenna access points (APs) and spatially correlated Rician fading channels. The significant phase-shift of the line-of-sight component induced by the user equipment movement is modeled randomly. Furthermore, we investigate the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) with maximum ratio (MR)/local minimum mean squared error (L-MMSE) combining and optimal large-scale fading decoding based on the phase-aware MMSE, phase-aware element-wise MMSE and linear MMSE (LMMSE) estimators. Then new closed-form SE expressions with MR combining are derived. Numerical results validate our derived expressions and show that the SE benefits from the spatial correlation. It is important to observe that the performance gap between L-MMSE and MR combining increases with the number of antennas per AP and the SE of the LMMSE estimator is lower than that of other estimators due to the lack of phase-shifts knowledge.

This paper considers wireless uplink information and downlink power transfer in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output systems. The single-antenna user equipments (UEs) utilize the energy harvested in the downlink to transmit uplink pilot and information signals to the multiple-antenna access points (APs). We consider Rician fading and maximum ratio processing based on either linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) or least-squares (LS) channel estimation. We derive the average harvested energy by using a practical non-linear energy harvesting circuit model for both coherent and non-coherent transmission schemes. Furthermore, the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) is derived for all the considered methods and the max-min fairness problem is cast where the optimization variables are the AP and UE power control coefficients together with the large-scale fading decoding vectors. The objective is to maximize the minimum SE of the UEs under APs and UEs transmission power constraints. A novel alternating optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence and improvement at each step is proposed to solve the highly-coupled non-convex problem.

In this work, we consider a random access Internet of Things IoT wireless network assisted by two aggregators collecting information from two disjoint groups of sensors. The nodes and the aggregators are transmitting in a random access manner under slotted time, the aggregators perform network-level cooperation for the data collection. The aggregators are equipped with queues to store data packets that are transmitted by the network nodes and relaying them to the destination node. We characterize the throughput performance of the IoT network and we obtain the stability conditions for the queues at the aggregators. We apply the theory of boundary value problems to analyze the delay performance. Our results show that the presence of the aggregators provides significant gains in the IoT network performance, in addition, we provide useful insights regarding the scalability of the IoT network. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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 access in cell-free massive MIMO systems, which comprises one initial access algorithm, a partial large-scale fading decoding (P-LSFD) strategy, two pilot assignment schemes, and one fractional power control policy. New closed-form spectral efficiency (SE) expressions with maximum ratio (MR) combining are derived. The simulation results show that our proposed framework provides high SE when using local partial minimum mean-square error (LP-MMSE) and MR combining. Specifically, the proposed initial access algorithm and pilot assignment schemes outperform their corresponding benchmarks, P-LSFD achieves scalability with a negligible performance loss compared to the conventional optimal large-scale fading decoding (LSFD), and scalable fractional power control provides a controllable trade-off between user fairness and the average SE.

Massive access, also known as massive connectivity or massive machine-type communication (mMTC), is one of the main use cases of the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks. A typical application of massive access is the cellular Internet of Things (IoT). Different from conventional human-type communication, massive access aims at realizing efficient and reliable communications for a massive number of IoT devices. Hence, the main characteristics of massive access include low power, massive connectivity, and broad coverage, which require new concepts, theories, and paradigms for the design of next-generation cellular networks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of massive access design for B5G wireless networks. Specifically, we provide a detailed review of massive access from the perspectives of theory, protocols, techniques, coverage, energy, and security. Furthermore, several future research directions and challenges are identified.

The operation of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) under predictable receiver mobility is investigated. We develop a continuous time system model for multipath channels and discuss the optimal IRS configuration with respect to received power, Doppler spread, and delay spread. It is shown that the received power can be maximized without adding Doppler spread to the system. In a numerical case study, we show that an IRS having the size of just two large billboards can improve the link budget of ground to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite links by up to 6dB. It also adds a second, almost equivalently strong, communication path that improves the link reliability.

This paper investigates the performance of limited-fronthaul cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) taking account the fronthaul quantization and imperfect channel acquisition. Three cases are studied, which we refer to as Estimate&Quantize, Quantize&Estimate, and Decentralized, according to where channel estimation is performed and exploited. Maximum-ratio combining (MRC), zero-forcing (ZF), and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) receivers are considered. The Max algorithm and the Bussgang decomposition are exploited to model optimum uniform quantization. Exploiting the optimal step size of the quantizer, analytical expressions for spectral and energy efficiencies are presented. Finally, an access point (AP) assignment algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of the decentralized scheme. Numerical results investigate the performance gap between limited fronthaul and perfect fronthaul cases, and demonstrate that exploiting relatively few quantization bits, the performance of limited-fronthaul cell-free massive MIMO closely approaches the perfect-fronthaul performance.

Many of the systems in various signal processing applications are nonlinear due to, for example, hardware impairments, such as nonlinear amplifiers and finite-resolution quantization. The Bussgang decomposition is a popular tool used when analyzing the performance of systems that involve such nonlinear components. In a nutshell, the decomposition provides an exact probabilistic relationship between the output and the input of a nonlinearity: the output is equal to a scaled version of the input plus uncorrelated distortion. The decomposition can be used to compute either exact performance results or lower bounds, where the uncorrelated distortion is treated as independent noise. This lecture note explains the basic theory, provides key examples, extends the theory to complex-valued vector signals, and clarifies some potential misconceptions.

The fifth generation (5G) wireless communication networks are being deployed worldwide from 2020 and more capabilities are in the process of being standardized, such as mass connectivity, ultra-reliability, and guaranteed low latency. However, 5G will not meet all requirements of the future in 2030 and beyond, and sixth generation (6G) wireless communication networks are expected to provide global coverage, enhanced spectral/energy/cost efficiency, better intelligence level and security, etc. To meet these requirements, 6G networks will rely on new enabling technologies, i.e., air interface and transmission technologies and novel network architecture, such as waveform design, multiple access, channel coding schemes, multi-antenna technologies, network slicing, cell-free architecture, and cloud/fog/edge computing. Our vision on 6G is that it will have four new paradigm shifts. First, to satisfy the requirement of global coverage, 6G will not be limited to terrestrial communication networks, which will need to be complemented with non-terrestrial networks such as satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication networks, thus achieving a space-air-ground-sea integrated communication network. Second, all spectra will be fully explored to further increase data rates and connection density, including the sub-6 GHz, millimeter wave (mmWave), terahertz (THz), and optical frequency bands. Third, facing the big datasets generated by the use of extremely heterogeneous networks, diverse communication scenarios, large numbers of antennas, wide bandwidths, and new service requirements, 6G networks will enable a new range of smart applications with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data technologies. Fourth, network security will have to be strengthened when developing 6G networks. This article provides a comprehensive survey of recent advances and future trends in these four aspects. Clearly, 6G with additional technical requirements beyond those of 5G will enable faster and further communications to the extent that the boundary between physical and cyber worlds disappears.

The use of large arrays might be the solution to the capacity problems in wireless communications. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) grows linearly with the number of array elements N whenusing Massive MIMO receivers and half-duplex relays. Moreover, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs)have recently attracted attention since these can relay signals to achieve an SNR that grows as N2, whichseems like a major benefit. In this article, we use a deterministic propagation model for a planar arrayof arbitrary size, to demonstrate that the mentioned SNR behaviors, and associated power scaling laws,only apply in the far-field. They cannot be used to study the regime where N → ∞. We derive an exactchannel gain expression that captures three essential near-field behaviors and use it to revisit the powerscaling laws. We derive new finite asymptotic SNR limits but also conclude that these are unlikely tobe approached in practice. We further prove that an IRS-aided setup cannot achieve a higher SNR thanan equal-sized Massive MIMO setup, despite its faster SNR growth. We quantify analytically how muchlarger the IRS must be to achieve the same SNR. Finally, we show that an optimized IRS does not behaveas an “anomalous” mirror but can vastly outperform that benchmark

The search for physical layer technologies that can play a key role in beyond 5G systems has started. One option is reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which can collect wireless signals from a transmitter and passively beamform them toward the receiver. The technology has exciting prospects and is quickly gaining traction in the communication community, but in the current hype we have witnessed how several myths and overstatements are spreading in the literature. In this article, we take a neutral look at the RIS technology. We first review the fundamentals and then explain specific features that can be easily misinterpreted. In particular, we debunk three myths: 1) current network technology can only control the transmitter and receiver, not the environment in between; 2) a better asymptotic array gain is achieved than with conventional beamforming; 3) the path loss is the same as with anomalous mirrors. To inspire further research, we conclude by identifying two critical questions that must be answered for RIS to become a successful technology: 1) What is a convincing use case for RIS?; 2) How can we estimate channels and control an RIS in real time?

Employing massively distributed antennas brings radio access points (RAPs) closer to users, enabling aggressive spectrum reuse that can bridge gaps between the scarce spectrum resource and extremely high connection densities in future wireless systems. Examples include the cloud radio access network (C-RAN), ultradense network (UDN), and cell-free massive multiple-input, multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) systems. These systems are usually designed in the form of fiber wireless communications (FWC), where distributed antennas or RAPs are connected to a central unit (CU) through optical fronthauls. A large number of densely deployed antennas or RAPs require an extensive infrastructure of optical fronthauls. Consequently, the cost, complexity, and power consumption of the network of optical fronthauls may dominate the performance of the entire system. This article provides an overview and outlook on the architecture, modeling, design, and performance of massively distributed antenna systems (DAS) with nonideal optical fronthauls. Complex interactions between optical fronthauls and wireless access links require optimum designs across the optical and wireless domains by jointly exploiting their unique characteristics. It is demonstrated that systems with analog radio-frequency-overfiber (RFoF) links outperform their baseband-overfiber (BBoF) or intermediate-frequency-overfiber (IFoF) counterparts for systems with shorte fiber length and more RAPs, which are all desired properties for future wireless communication systems.

In this paper, we propose a method of improving the channel estimates for non-coherent multi-antenna terminals, which are terminals that cannot control the relative phase between its antenna ports, with channels that can be considered constant over multiple time slots. The terminals have multiple antennas and are free to choose whichever antenna they want to use in each time slot. An unknown phase shift is introduced in each time slot as we cannot guarantee that the terminals are phase coherent across time slots. We compare three different clustering techniques that we use to detect the active antenna. We also compare a set of different statistical and heuristic estimators for the channels and the phase shifts. We evaluate the methods by using correlated Rayleigh fading and three different bounds on the uplink capacity. The accuracy of the capacity bounds are verified with bit-error-rate simulations. With our proposed methods we can have an SNR improvement of approximately 2 dB at 1 bit/s/Hz.

This letter develops an optimum beamforming method for downlink transmissions in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which employ a massive number of distributed access points to provide concurrent services to multiple users. The optimum design is formulated as a max-min problem that maximizes the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of all users. It is shown analytically that the problem is quasi-concave, and the optimum solution is obtained with the second-order cone programming. The proposed method identifies the best achievable beamforming performance in cell-free massive MIMO systems. The results can be used as benchmarks for the design of practical low complexity beamformers.

This paper considers the sum spectral efficiency (SE) optimization problem in multi-cell Massive MIMO systems with a varying number of active users. This is formulated as a joint pilot and data power control problem. Since the problem is non-convex, we first derive a novel iterative algorithm that obtains a stationary point in polynomial time. To enable real-time implementation, we also develop a deep learning solution. The proposed neural network, PowerNet, only uses the large-scale fading information to predict both the pilot and data powers. The main novelty is that we exploit the problem structure to design a single neural network that can handle a dynamically varying number of active users; hence, PowerNet is simultaneously approximating many different power control functions with varying number inputs and outputs. This is not the case in prior works and thus makes PowerNet an important step towards a practically useful solution. Numerical results demonstrate that PowerNet only loses 2% in sum SE, compared to the iterative algorithm, in a nine-cell system with up to 90 active users per in each coherence interval, and the runtime was only 0.03 ms on a graphics processing unit (GPU). When good data labels are selected for the training phase, PowerNet can yield better sum SE than by solving the optimization problem with one initial point.

We consider joint beamforming of data to scheduled terminals (STs) and broadcast of system information (SI) to idle terminals (ITs) on the same time-frequency resource in multi-cell multi-user massive MIMO systems. We consider two different types of SI broadcast, i) synchronous broadcast of common (i.e., same) SI symbols from all cells, and ii) synchronous broadcast of cell-specific SI symbols from each cell. Through analysis we derive expressions for the achievable sum rate to STs in each cell and the rate of SI transmission to an IT for both these types of SI broadcast. We also derive expressions for the sum rate to STs and the rate to an IT for traditional orthogonal access (OA) where a fraction of physical resource is reserved for broadcast of SI. Simulations reveal that, just as in the single-cell scenario, for the multi-cell scenario also, joint beamforming and broadcasting (JBB) is more energy efficient than OA.

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Multiple antenna technologies have attracted much research interest for several decades and have gradually made their way into mainstream communication systems. Two main benefits are adaptive beamforming gains and spatial multiplexing, leading to high data rates per user and per cell, especially when large antenna arrays are adopted. Since multiple antenna technology has become a key component of the fifth-generation (5G) networks, it is time for the research community to look for new multiple antenna technologies to meet the immensely higher data rate, reliability, and traffic demands in the beyond 5G era. Radically new approaches are required to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in these metrics. There will be large technical challenges, many of which are yet to be identified. In this paper, we survey three new multiple antenna technologies that can play key roles in beyond 5G networks: cell-free massive MIMO, beamspace massive MIMO, and intelligent reflecting surfaces. For each of these technologies, we present the fundamental motivation, key characteristics, recent technical progresses, and provide our perspectives for future research directions. The paper is not meant to be a survey/tutorial of a mature subject, but rather serve as a catalyst to encourage more research and experiments in these multiple antenna technologies.

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 large networks with many users. We propose a new framework for scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems by exploiting the dynamic cooperation cluster concept from the Network MIMO literature. We provide a novel algorithm for joint initial access, pilot assignment, and cluster formation that is proved to be scalable. Moreover, we adapt the standard channel estimation, precoding, and combining methods to become scalable. A new uplink and downlink duality is proved and used to heuristically design the precoding vectors on the basis of the combining vectors. Interestingly, the proposed scalable precoding and combining outperform conventional maximum ratio (MR) processing and also performs closely to the best unscalable alternatives.

Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a promising distributed network architecture for 5G-and-beyond systems. It guarantees ubiquitous coverage at high spectral efficiency (SE) by leveraging signal co-processing at multiple access points (APs), aggressive spatial user multiplexing and extraordinary macro-diversity gain. In this study, we propose two distributed precoding schemes, referred to as local partial zero-forcing (PZF) and local protective partial zero-forcing (PPZF), that further improve the spectral efficiency by providing an adaptable trade-off between interference cancelation and boosting of the desired signal, with no additional front-hauling overhead, and implementable by APs with very few antennas. We derive closed-form expressions for the achievable SE under the assumption of independent Rayleigh fading channel, channel estimation error and pilot contamination. PZF and PPZF can substantially outperform maximum ratio transmission and zero-forcing, and their performance is comparable to that achieved by regularized zero-forcing (RZF), which is a benchmark in the downlink. Importantly, these closed-form expressions can be employed to devise optimal (long-term) power control strategies that are also suitable for RZF, whose closed-form expression for the SE is not available.

In this paper, we consider a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enabled heterogeneous small cells network (HSCN), where the macro base station simultaneously communicates with multiple small cell base stations (SBSs) through wireless backhaul. In each small cell, users are grouped by NOMA bases and then served by their respective SBS. The proposed framework considers the realistic imperfect channel state information and quality of service requirements of users. The goal is to investigate an energy-efficient joint power, and bandwidth allocation scheme, which aims to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the small cells in downlink NOMA-HSCN constrained by the maximum transmit power and the minimum required data rate simultaneously. The optimization problem is non-convex due to the fractional objective function and non-convex constraint and thus challenging to obtain an exact solution efficiently. To this end, the joint optimization is first decomposed into two subproblems. Then, an iterative algorithm to solve the power optimization subproblem is proposed with guaranteed convergence. Furthermore, we derive a closed-form solution for the bandwidth allocation subproblem. Simulation results reveal that the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in terms of EE compared to the existing NOMA and the orthogonal multiple access schemes.

In this work, the performance evaluation and the optimization of dual-hop LoRa network are investigated. In particular, the coverage probability (Pcov) of edge end-devices (EDs) is computed in closed-form expressions under various fading channels, i.e., Nakagami-m and Rayleigh fading. The Pcov under Nakagami-m fading is computed in the approximated closed-form expressions; the Pcov under Rayleigh fading, on the other hand, is calculated in the exact closed-form expressions. In addition, we also investigate the impact of different kinds of interference on the performance of the Pcov, i.e., intra-SF interference, inter-SF interference (or capture effect) and both intra- and inter-SF interference. Our findings show that the impact of imperfect orthogonality is not non-negligible, along with the intra-SF interference. Moreover, based on the proposed mathematical framework, we formulate an optimization problem, which finds the optimal location of the relay to maximize the coverage probability. Since it is a mixed integer program with a non-convex objective function, we decompose the original problem with discrete optimization variables into sub-problems with a convex feasible set. After that, each sub-problem is effectively solved by utilizing the gradient descent approach. Monte Carlo simulations are supplied to verify the correctness of our mathematical framework. In addition, the results manifest that our proposed optimization algorithm converges rapidly, and the coverage probability is significantly improved when the location of relay is optimized.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is a promising solution to build a programmable wireless environment via steering the incident signal in fully customizable ways with reconfigurable passive elements. In this paper, we consider a RIS-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink communication system. Our objective is to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of all users by joint designing the beamforming at the access point (AP) and the phase vector of the RIS elements, while both the perfect channel state information (CSI) setup and the imperfect CSI setup are investigated. For perfect CSI setup, a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to obtain the stationary solution for the joint design problem by utilizing the fractional programming technique. Then, we resort to the stochastic successive convex approximation technique and extend the proposed algorithm to the scenario wherein the CSI is imperfect. The validity of the proposed methods is confirmed by numerical results. In particular, the proposed algorithm performs quite well when the channel uncertainty is smaller than 10%.

We correct the achievable rates (42) and (47) for small cells in "Cell-free massive MIMO versus small cells," IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 16, 2017.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have attracted much attention lately due to the many advantages they provide over single-antenna systems. Owing to the many antennas, low-cost implementation and low power consumption per antenna are desired. To that end, massive MIMO structures with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADC) have been investigated in many studies. However, the effect of a strong interferer in the adjacent band on quantized massive MIMO systems have not been examined yet. In this study, we analyze the performance of uplink massive MIMO with low-resolution ADCs under frequency selective fading with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in the perfect and imperfect receiver channel state information cases. We derive analytical expressions for the bit error rate and ergodic capacity. We show that the interfering band can be suppressed by increasing the number of antennas or the oversampling rate when a zero-forcing receiver is employed.

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are being the target of various jamming, spoofing, and meaconing attacks. This paper proposes a new statistical test for the presence of multiple spoofers based on range measurements observed by a plurality of receivers located on a rigid body platform. The relative positions of the receivers are known, but the location and orientation of the platform are unknown. The test is based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) paradigm and essentially performs a consistency check between the set of observed range measurements and known information about the satellite topology and the geometry of the receiver constellation. Optimal spoofing locations and optimal artificial time delays (as induced by the spoofers) are also determined.Exact evaluation of the GLRT requires the maximum-likelihood estimates of all parameters, which proves difficult. Instead, approximations based on iterative algorithms and the squared-range least squares algorithm are derived. The accuracy of these approximations is benchmarked against Cramer-Rao lower bounds.Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show that increasing the number of GNSS receivers makes the attack easier to detect. We also show that using multiple GNSS receivers limits the availability of optimal attack positions.

Cell-free Massive MIMO is considered as a promising technology for satisfying the increasing number of users and high rate expectations in beyond-5G networks. The key idea is to let many distributed access points (APs) communicate with all users in the network, possibly by using joint coherent signal processing. The aim of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive analysis of this technology under different degrees of cooperation among the APs. Particularly, the uplink spectral efficiencies of four different cell-free implementations are analyzed, with spatially correlated fading and arbitrary linear processing. It turns out that it is possible to outperform conventional Cellular Massive MIMO and small cell networks by a wide margin, but only using global or local minimum mean-square error (MMSE) combining. This is in sharp contrast to the existing literature, which advocates for maximum-ratio combining. Also, we show that a centralized implementation with optimal MMSE processing not only maximizes the SE but largely reduces the fronthaul signaling compared to the standard distributed approach. This makes it the preferred way to operate Cell-free Massive MIMO networks. Non-linear decoding is also investigated and shown to bring negligible improvements.

In this brief, we propose a framework for protecting the uplink transmission of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) system from a jamming attack. Our framework includes a novel minimum mean-squared error-based jamming suppression (MMSE-JS) estimator for channel training and a linear zero-forcing jamming suppression (ZFJS) detector for uplink combining. The MMSE-JS exploits some intentionally unused pilots to reduce the pilot contamination caused by the jammer. The ZFJS suppresses the jamming interference during the detection of the legitimate users data symbols. The proposed framework is implementable, since the complexities of computing the MMSE-JS and the ZFJS are linear (not exponential) with respect to the number of antennas at the base station and can be fabricated using 28-nm fully depleted silicon on insulator technology and for the mMIMO systems. Our analysis shows that the jammer cannot dramatically affect the performance of an mMIMO system equipped with the combination of MMSE-JS and ZFJS. Numerical results confirm our analysis.

Full-duplex two-way relay (FD-TWR) system has potential to increase the spectral efficiency in the future 5G wireless system. Full-duplex transceiver suffers from inevitable self-interference (SI) which can be alleviated by active self-interference cancellation (SIC) method. However, the mitigation capability of SIC mechanism is limited specifically due to inherent non-linearities of transmitter and receiver front end. As a consequence, residual self-interference (RSI) will degrade the systems signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and throughput. Non-linearity in RF power amplifier in collusion with time-variant channel results is a great challenge in efficient signal detection and successful SI suppression. In contrast to classical schemes, which consider non-linear distortion at the transmitter, we present a semi-blind data detection and non-linear channel estimation in the presence of RSI at the receiver. Attributed to non-linearity, the target posterior probability density function is mathematically intractable. In this paper, a sequential importance sampling based particle filtering is used for joint data detection and estimation. Intractable distribution is approximated by using weighted random measures. A Taylors series expansion is used to locally linearize the non-analytic form of distribution. Numerical results validate the joint detection and channel estimation scheme. The robustness of the scheme is verified in presence of RSI under high mobility.

Green low power networking with the least requirement of dedicated radio resources is need of the hour which has led to the upsurge of backscatter communication (BSC) technology. However, this inherent potential of BSC is challenged by hardware constraints of the underlying tags. We address this timely concern by investigating the practical efficacy of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology in overcoming the fundamental limitations of BSC. Specifically, we first introduce a novel least-squares based channel estimation (CE) protocol for multi-tag BSC settings that takes care of both the unintended ambient reflections and the inability of tags in performing estimation by themselves. Then using it, a nontrivial low-complexity algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal transceiver designs for the multiantenna reader to maximize the minimum value of the lower-bounded backscattered throughput among the single-antenna semi-passive tags. Additional analytical insights on both individually and jointly-optimal precoding vector and detector matrix at the reader are provided by exploring the asymptotically-optimal transceiver designs. Lastly detailed numerical investigation is carried out to validate the theoretical results and quantify the practically realizable throughput fairness. Specifically, more than seven-fold increase in the common-backscattered-throughput among tags as achieved by the proposed designs over the relevant benchmarks corroborates their practical significance.

What will it take for drones, and the whole associated ecosystem, to take off? Arguably, infallible Camp;C channels for safe and autonomous flying, and high-throughput links for multi-purpose live video streaming. And indeed, meeting these aspirations may entail full cellular support, provided through 5G-and-beyond hardware and software upgrades by both mobile operators and manufacturers of these UAVs. In this article, we vouch for massive MIMO as the key building block to realize 5G-connected UAVs. Through the sheer evidence of 3GPP-compliant simulations, we demonstrate how massive MIMO can be enhanced by complementary network-based and UAV-based solutions, resulting in consistent UAV Camp;C support, large UAV uplink data rates, and harmonious coexistence with legacy ground users.

In this paper, we study the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) spectral efficiency (SE) of a cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system over Rician fading channels. The phase of the line-of-sight (LoS) path is modeled as a uniformly distributed random variable to take the phase-shifts due to mobility and phase noise into account. Considering the availability of prior information at the access points (APs), the phase-aware minimum mean square error (MMSE), non-aware linear MMSE (LMMSE), and least-square (LS) estimators are derived. The MMSE estimator requires perfectly estimated phase knowledge whereas the LMMSE and LS are derived without it. In the UL, a two-layer decoding method is investigated in order to mitigate both coherent and non-coherent interference. Closed-form UL SE expressions with phase-aware MMSE, LMMSE, and LS estimators are derived for maximum-ratio (MR) combining in the first layer and optimal large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) in the second layer. In the DL, two different transmission modes are studied: coherent and non-coherent. Closed-form DL SE expressions for both transmission modes with MR precoding are derived for the three estimators. Numerical results show that the LSFD improves the UL SE performance and coherent transmission mode performs much better than non-coherent transmission in the DL. Besides, the performance loss due to the lack of phase information depends on the pilot length and it is small when the pilot contamination is low.

Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multipleoutput) refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system where all the access points (APs) cooperate to coherently serve all the user equipments (UEs), suppress inter-cell interference and mitigate the multiuser interference. Recent works 1, 2 demonstrated that, unlike co-located Massive MIMO, the channel hardening is, in general, less pronounced in cell-free Massive MIMO, thus there is much to benefit from estimating the downlink channel. In this study, we investigate the gain introduced by the downlink beamforming training, extending the analysis in 1 to non-orthogonal uplink and downlink pilots. Assuming singleantenna APs, conjugate beamforming and independent Rayleigh fading channel, we derive a closed-form expression for the peruser achievable downlink rate that addresses channel estimation errors and pilot contamination both at the AP and UE side. The performance evaluation includes max-min fairness power control, greedy pilot assignment methods, and a comparison between achievable rates obtained from different capacitybounding techniques. Numerical results show that downlink beamforming training, although increases pilot overhead and introduces additional pilot contamination, improves significantly the achievable downlink rate. Even for large number of APs, it is not fully efficient for the UE relying on the statistical channel state information for data decoding.

In this paper, multi-group multicast beamforming is considered for the full digital and hybrid beamforming. The wireless system comprises of a multiple-antenna base station and single-antenna users. Quality-of-service (QoS)-aware design is investigated where the optimization objective is to minimize the total transmitted power subject to the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint at each user. In addition to the SINR constraints, per-antenna power constraint is included for each antenna of the base station. The original optimization problem for full digital beamforming is transformed into an equivalent form such that the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) can be applied in an effective and computationally inexpensive manner for the large-scale antenna systems. In this new formulation, the beamformer weight vectors are decomposed into two subspaces in order to decrease the number of dual variables and multiplications. The optimum update equations are obtained for the proposed ADMM algorithm. This new reformulation is used for two different hybrid beamforming structures employing phase shifters and vector modulators. Optimum updates are derived for each system. The proposed algorithms decrease computational complexity of the existing ADMM algorithms due to the effective reformulation as well as the direct solution of the nonconvex problem. In the simulation results, it is shown that the proposed methods have better convergence behavior and less computational time than the benchmark algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed method for hybrid beamforming with vector modulators performs better than its counterpart in the literature in terms of transmitted power. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Since the first cellular networks were trialled in the 1970s, we have witnessed an incredible wireless revolution. From 1G to 4G, the massive traffic growth has been managed by a combination of wider bandwidths, refined radio interfaces, and network densification, namely increasing the number of antennas per site. Due its cost-efficiency, the latter has contributed the most. Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a key 5G technology that uses massive antenna arrays to provide a very high beamforming gain and spatially multiplexing of users and hence increases the spectral and energy efficiency (see references herein). It constitutes a centralized solution to densify a network, and its performance is limited by the inter-cell interference inherent in its cell-centric design. Conversely, ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system implementing coherent user-centric transmission to overcome the inter-cell interference limitation in cellular networks and provide additional macro-diversity. These features, combined with the system scalability inherent in the Massive MIMO design, distinguish ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO from prior coordinated distributed wireless systems. In this article, we investigate the enormous potential of this promising technology while addressing practical deployment issues to deal with the increased back/front-hauling overhead deriving from the signal co-processing.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are proliferating. Applications, such as surveillance, disaster management, and drone racing, place high requirements on the communication with the drones in terms of throughput, reliability, and latency. The existing wireless technologies, notably Wi-Fi, that are currently used for drone connectivity are limited to short ranges and low-mobility situations. New, scalable technology is needed to meet future demands on long connectivity ranges, support for fast-moving drones, and the possibility to simultaneously communicate with entire swarms of drones. Massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO), the main technology component of emerging 5G standards, has the potential to meet these requirements.

We consider a two-way half-duplex relaying system where multiple pairs of single-antenna users exchange information assisted by a multiple-antenna relay. Taking into account the practical constraint of imperfect channel knowledge, we study the achievable sum spectral efficiency (SE) of the amplify-and-forward protocol, assuming that the relay employs maximum ratio processing. We derive a closed-form expression for the sum SE for arbitrary system parameters and a large-scale approximation for the sum SE when the number of relay antennas M becomes sufficiently large. In addition, we study how the transmit power reduces with M to maintain a desired SE. Our results show that by using a large number of relay antennas, the transmit powers of the user, relay, and pilot symbol can be scaled down proportionally to 1/M-alpha, 1/M beta, and 1/M-gamma for certain combinations of a, beta, and gamma, respectively. This elegant power scaling law reveals a fundamental tradeoff between the transmit powers of the user/relay and pilot symbol. Finally, capitalizing on the new expressions for the sum SE, novel power allocation schemes are designed to further improve the sum SE.

Smart multiantenna wireless power transmission can enable perpetual operation of energy harvesting (EH) nodes in the Internet-of-Things. Moreover, to overcome the increased hardware cost and space constraints associated with having large antenna arrays at the radio frequency (RF) energy source, the hybrid energy beamforming (EBF) architecture with single RF chain can be adopted. Using the recently proposed hybrid EBF architecture modeling the practical analog phase shifter impairments (API), we derive the optimal least-squares estimator for the energy source to an EH user channel. Next, the average harvested power at the user is derived while considering the nonlinear RF EH model and a tight analytical approximation for it is also presented by exploring the practical limits on the API. Using these developments, the jointly global optimal transmit power and time allocation for channel estimation (CE) and EBF phases, that maximizes the average energy stored at the EH user is derived in closed form. Numerical results validate the proposed analysis and present nontrivial design insights on the impact of API and CE errors on the achievable EBF performance. It is shown that the optimized hybrid EBF protocol with joint resource allocation yields an average performance improvement of 37% over benchmark fixed allocation scheme.

The use of base stations (BSs) and access points (APs) with a large number of antennas, called Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output), is a key technology for increasing the capacity of 5G networks and beyond. While originally conceived for conventional sub-6 GHz frequencies, Massive MIMO (mMIMO) is also ideal for frequency bands in the range 30-300 GHz, known as millimeter wave (mmWave). Despite conceptual similarities, the way in which mMIMO can be exploited in these bands is radically different, due to their specific propagation behaviors and hardware characteristics. This article reviews these differences and their implications, while dispelling common misunderstandings. Building on this foundation, we suggest appropriate signal processing schemes and use cases to efficiently exploit mMIMO in both frequency bands.

Having lower quantization resolution, has been introduced in the literature, to reduce the power consumption of massive MIMO and millimeter wave MIMO systems. Here, we analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of quantized uplink massive MIMO employing few-bit resolution ADCs. Considering ZF detection, we derive a signal-to-interference, quantization and noise ratio (SIQNR) to achieve an analytical BER approximation for coarsely quantized M-QAM massive MIMO systems, by using a linear quantization model. The proposed expression is a function of the quantization resolution in bits. We further numerically investigate the effects of different quantization levels, from 1-bit to 4-bits, on the BER of three modulation types QPSK, 16-QAM, and 64-QAM. The uniform and non-uniform quantizers are employed in our simulation. Monte Carlo simulation results reveal that our approximate formula gives a tight upper bound on the BER performance of b-bit resolution quantized systems using non-uniform quantizers, whereas the use of uniform quantizers cause a lower performance. We also found a small BER performance degradation in coarsely quantized systems, for example 2-3 bits QPSK and 3-4 bits 16-QAM, compared to the full-precision (unquantized) case. However, this performance degradation can be compensated by increasing the number of antennas at the BS. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.

We show that end-to-end learning of communication systems through deep neural network autoencoders can be extremely vulnerable to physical adversarial attacks. Specifically, we elaborate how an attacker can craft effective physical black-box adversarial attacks. Due to the openness (broadcast nature) of the wireless channel, an adversary transmitter can increase the block-error-rate of a communication system by orders of magnitude by transmitting a well-designed perturbation signal over the channel. We reveal that the adversarial attacks are more destructive than the jamming attacks. We also show that classical coding schemes are more robust than the autoencoders against both adversarial and jamming attacks.

In this paper, we consider device-to-device (D2D) communication that is underlaid in a multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system and proposes a new framework for power control and pilot allocation. In this scheme, the cellular users (CUs) in each cell get orthogonal pilots which are reused with reuse factor one across cells, while all the D2D pairs share another set of orthogonal pilots. We derive a closed-form capacity lower bound for the CUs with different receive processing schemes. In addition, we derive a capacity lower bound for the D2D receivers and a closed-form approximation of it. We provide power control algorithms to maximize the minimum spectral efficiency (SE) and to maximize the product of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios in the network. Different from prior works, in our proposed power control schemes, we consider joint pilot and data transmission optimization. Finally, we provide a numerical evaluation, where we compare our proposed power control schemes with the maximum transmit power case and the case of conventional multi-cell massive MIMO without D2D communication. Based on the provided results, we conclude that our proposed scheme increases the sum SE of multi-cell massive MIMO networks.

In modern mixed-signal systems, it is important to build the conversion components with a flat frequency response over their full Nyquist frequency band. However, with increasing circuit speed, it is becoming more difficult to achieve this, due to limitations of the analog front-end circuits. This paper considers finite-length impulse-response (FIR) filters, designed in the least-squares sense, for the bandwidth extension of analog-to-digital converters, which is one of the most important applications in frequency response equalization. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, based on extensive simulations, filter order-estimation expressions of the least-squares designed equalizers are derived. It appears to be the first time that order-estimation expressions are presented for any least-squares designed FIR filter. These expressions accurately estimate the order required for given specifications on the targeted extended bandwidth systems. Secondly, based on the derived order-estimation expressions, systematic design procedures are presented, which contribute to reducing the design time. Finally, a relation between the dynamic-range degradation and the system parameters is also derived and verified in the paper.

In this paper a built-in-self-test (BiST) aimed at the third and second intercept point (IP3/IP2) characterization of RF receiver is discussed with a focus on a stimulus generator. The generator is designed based on a specialized phase-lock loop (PLL) architecture with two voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) operating in GHz frequency range. The objective of PLL is to keep the VCOs frequency spacing under control. According to the test requirements the phase noise and nonlinear distortion of the two-tone generator are considered as a merit for the design of VCOs and analog adder. The PLL reference spurs, critical for the IP3 measurement, are avoided by means of a frequency doubling technique. The circuit is designed in 65nm CMOS. A highly linear analog adder with OIP3amp;gt;+15dBm and ring VCOs with phase noise amp;lt; -104 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset are used to generate the RF stimulus of total power greater than -22dBm. In simulations a performance sufficient for IP3/IP2 test of a typical RF CMOS receiver is demonstrated.

In this paper, we consider the full-duplex decode-and-forward wireless-powered relaying system, which employs energy harvesting protocol with power splitting. The robust joint optimum relay transmit beamformer and power splitting factor are obtained for the quality of service (QoS)-aware problem for the first time in the literature. The optimum solution is found by analyzing the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, thanks to the effective reformulation of the problem in an equivalent and simplified manner. In addition, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) maximization problem is investigated in order to find the robust optimum solution. The simulation results verify the optimality of the proposed method compared with the sub-optimum one which is presented by Zhao et al.. In the next part of this paper, the considered system is generalized by employing multiple receive antennas at the relay. Both QoS-aware and SINR maximization problems are considered. The near-optimum relay transmit and receive beamformers as well as power splitting factor are found by optimizing the variables alternately. First, transmit beamformer and power splitting factor are found optimally for a given initial receive beamformer. Then, the optimum receive beamformer is obtained. Relay with multiple-receive antennas is shown to perform better than the single receive antenna relay in terms of SINR and transmission power.

We investigate the effect of bursty traffic in a long term evolution (LTE) and Wi-Fi aggregation (LWA)-enabled network. The LTE base station routes packets of the same IP flow through the LIE and Wi-Fi links independently. We motivate the use of superposition coding at the LWA-mode Wi-Fi access point (AP) so that it can serve LWA users and Wi-Fi users simultaneously. A random access protocol is applied in such system, which allows the native-mode AP to access the channel with probabilities that depend on the queue size of the LWA-mode AP to avoid impeding the performance of the LWA-enabled network. We analyze the throughput of the native Wi-Fi network and the delay experienced by the LWA users, accounting for the native-mode AP access probability, the traffic flow splitting between LTE and Wi-Fi, and the operating mode of the LWA user with both LIE and Wi-Fi interfaces. Our results show some fundamental tradeoffs in the throughput and delay behavior of LWA-enabled networks, which provide meaningful insight into the operation of such aggregated systems.

Backscatter communication (BSC) technology can enable ubiquitous deployment of low-cost sustainable wireless devices. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of a full-duplex multiple-input-multiple-output reader for enhancing the limited communication range of monostatic BSC systems. As this performance is strongly influenced by the channel estimation (CE) quality, we first derive a novel least-squares estimator for the forward and backward links between the reader and the tag, assuming that reciprocity holds and K orthogonal pilots are transmitted from the first K antennas of an N antenna reader. We also obtain the corresponding linear minimum-mean square-error estimate for the backscattered channel. After defining the transceiver design at the reader using these estimates, we jointly optimize the number of orthogonal pilots and energy allocation for the CE and information decoding phases to maximize the average backscattered signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for efficiently decoding the tags messages. The unimodality of this SNR in optimization variables along with a tight analytical approximation for the jointly global optimal design is also discoursed. Lastly, the selected numerical results validate the proposed analysis, present key insights into the optimal resource utilization at reader, and quantify the achievable gains over the benchmark schemes.

We consider transmission of system information in a cell-free massive MIMO system, when the transmitting access points do not have any channel state information and the receiving terminal has to estimate the channel based on downlink pilots. We analyze the system performance in terms of outage rate and coverage probability and use space-time block codes to increase performance. We propose a heuristic method for pilot/data power optimization that can be applied without any channel state information at the access points. We also analyze the problem of grouping the access points, which is needed when the single-antenna access points jointly transmit a space-time block code.

We analyze the effect of channel aging on the achievable rate of time division duplexed massive multiple input multiple output systems serving a number of users under aging channels, using nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Using the recently proposed shared uplink pilot based channel estimation for NOMA, we derive bounds on the channel estimation error variance for the two schemes. We then derive the achievable spectral efficiencies of the two schemes. Using numerical results, we show that, in slowly varying channels, using NOMA with shared pilots is preferable over OMA, while the reverse is true under fast varying channels.

Deep learning (DL), despite its enormous success in many computer vision and language processing applications, is exceedingly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We consider the use of DL for radio signal (modulation) classification tasks, and present practical methods for the crafting of white-box and universal black-box adversarial attacks in that application. We show that these attacks can considerably reduce the classification performance, with extremely small perturbations of the input. In particular, these attacks are significantly more powerful than classical jamming attacks, which raises significant security and robustness concerns in the use of DL-based algorithms for the wireless physical layer.

In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization of base station (BS) location, its density, and transmit power allocation to minimize the overall network operational cost required to meet an underlying coverage constraint at each user equipment (UE), which is randomly deployed following the binomial point process (BPP). As this joint optimization problem is nonconvex and combinatorial in nature, we propose a non-trivial solution methodology that effectively decouples it into three individual optimization problems. Firstly, by using the distance distribution of the farthest UE from the BS, we present novel insights on optimal BS location in an optimal sectoring type for a given number of BSs. After that we provide a tight approximation for the optimal transmit power allocation to each BS. Lastly, using the latter two results, the optimal number of BSs that minimize the operational cost is obtained. Also, we have investigated both circular and square field deployments. Numerical results validate the analysis and provide practical insights on optimal BS deployment. We observe that the proposed joint optimization framework, that solves the coverage probability versus operational cost tradeoff, can yield a significant reduction of about 65% in the operational cost as compared to the benchmark fixed allocation scheme.

In massive multiple-input-multiple-output base stations, power consumption and cost of the low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) can be substantial because of the many antennas. We investigate the feasibility of inexpensive, power efficient LNAs, which inherently are less linear. A polynomial model is used to characterize the nonlinear LNAs and to derive the second-order statistics and spatial correlation of the distortion. We show that, with spatial matched filtering (maximum-ratio combining) at the receiver, some distortion terms combine coherently, and that the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio of the symbol estimates therefore is limited by the linearity of the LNAs. Furthermore, it is studied how the power from a blocker in the adjacent frequency band leaks into the main band and creates distortion. The distortion term that scales cubically with the power received from the blocker has a spatial correlation that can be filtered out by spatial processing and only the coherent term that scales quadratically with the power remains. When the blocker is in free-space line-of-sight and the LNAs are identical, this quadratic term has the same spatial direction as the desired signal, and hence cannot be removed by linear receiver processing.

The purpose of this paper is to bestow the reader with a timely study of UAV cellular communications, bridging the gap between the 3GPP standardization status quo and the more forward-looking research. Special emphasis is placed on the downlink command and control (Camp;C) channel to aerial users, whose reliability is deemed of paramount technological importance for the commercial success of UAV cellular communications. Through a realistic side-by-side comparison of two network deployments - a present-day cellular infrastructure versus a next-generation massive MIMO system - a plurality of key facts are cast light upon, with the three main ones summarized as follows: 1) UAV cell selection is essentially driven by the secondary lobes of a base stations radiation pattern, causing UAVs to associate to far-flung cells; 2) over a 10 MHz bandwidth, and for UAV heights of up to 300 m, massive MIMO networks can support 100 kbps Camp;C channels in 74% of the cases when the uplink pilots for channel estimation are reused among base station sites, and in 96% of the cases without pilot reuse across the network; and 3) supporting UAV Camp;C channels can considerably affect the performance of ground users on account of severe pilot contamination, unless suitable power control policies are in place.

In conventional cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, spectral efficiency loss occurs due to a half-duplex constraint. To address this issue, we propose an incremental cooperative NOMA (ICN) protocol for a two-user downlink network. In particular, this protocol allows the source to adaptively switch between a direct NOMA transmission mode and a cooperative NOMA transmission mode according to a 1-bit feedback from the far user. We analytically prove that the proposed ICN protocol outperforms the conventional cooperative NOMA protocol. In addition, an optimal power allocation strategy at the source is studied to minimize the asymptotic system outage probability. Finally, numerical results validate our theoretical analysis. present insights, and quantify the enhancement achieved over the benchmark scheme.

In this paper, we propose a decentralized access control scheme for interference management in device-to-device (D2D) underlaid cellular networks. Our method combines signal-to-interference ratio (SIR)-aware link activation with cellular guard zones in a system, where D2D links opportunistically access the licensed cellular spectrum when the activation conditions are satisfied. Analytical expressions for the success/coverage probability of both cellular and D2D links are derived. We characterize the impact of the guard zone radius and the SIR threshold on the D2D potential throughput and cellular coverage. A tractable approach is proposed to find the SIR threshold and guard zone radius that maximize the potential throughput of the D2D communication while ensuring sufficient coverage probability for the cellular uplink users. Simulations validate the accuracy of our analytical results and show the performance gain of the proposed scheme compared to prior state-of-the-art solutions.

The distortion from massive multiple-input multiple-output base stations with nonlinear amplifiers is studied and its radiation pattern is derived. The distortion is analyzed both in-band and out-of-band. By using an orthogonal Hermite representation of the amplified signal, the spatial cross-correlation matrix of the nonlinear distortion is obtained. It shows that, if the input signal to the amplifiers has a dominant beam, the distortion is beamformed in the same way as that beam. When there are multiple beams without any one being dominant, it is shown that the distortion is practically isotropic. The derived theory is useful to predict how the nonlinear distortion will behave, to analyze the out-of-band radiation, to do reciprocity calibration, and to schedule users in the frequency plane to minimize the effect of in-band distortion.

One of the main goals of the future wireless networks is improving the users quality of experience (QoE). In this paper, we consider the problem of the QoE-based resource allocation in the downlink of a massive multiple-input multiple-output heterogeneous network. The network consists of a macrocell with a number of small cells embedded in it. The small cells base stations (BSs) are equipped with a few antennas, while the macro BS is equipped with a massive number of antennas. We consider the two services Video and Web Browsing and design the beamforming vectors at the BSs. The objective is to maximize the aggregated mean opinion score (MOS) of the users under constraints on the BSs powers and the required quality of service of the users. We also consider extra constraints on the QoE of users to more strongly enforce the QoE in the beamforming design. To reduce the complexity of the optimization problem, we suggest suboptimal and computationally efficient solutions. Our results illustrate that increasing the number of antennas at the BSs and also increasing the number of small cells antennas in the network leads to a higher user satisfaction.

If we assume line-of-sight propagation and perfect channel state information at the base station - consistent with slow moving terminals - then a direct performance comparison between Massive MIMO at PCS and mmWave frequency bands is straightforward and highly illuminating. Line-of-sight propagation is considered favorable for mmWave because of minimal attenuation and its facilitation of hybrid beamforming to reduce the required number of active transceivers. We quantify the number of mmWave (60 GHz) service antennas that are needed to duplicate the performance of a specified number of PCS (1.9 GHz) service antennas. As a baseline we consider a modest PCS deployment of 128 antennas serving 18 terminals. At one extreme, we find that, to achieve the same per-terminal maxmin 95 percent-likely downlink throughput in a single-cell system, 20,000 mmWave antennas are needed. To match the total antenna area of the PCS array would require 128,000 half-wavelength mmWave antennas, but a much reduced number is adequate because the large number of antennas also confers greater channel orthogonality. At the other extreme, in a highly interference-limited multi-cell environment, only 215 mmWave antennas are needed; in this case, increasing the transmitted power yields little improvement in service quality.

Precoding has been conventionally considered as an effective means of mitigating or exploiting the interference in the multiantenna downlink channel, where multiple users are simultaneously served with independent information over the same channel resources. The early works in this area were focused on transmitting an individual information stream to each user by constructing weighted linear combinations of symbol blocks (codewords). However, more recent works have moved beyond this traditional view by: 1) transmitting distinct data streams to groups of users and 2) applying precoding on a symbol-persymbol basis. In this context, the current survey presents a unified view and classification of precoding techniques with respect to two main axes: 1) the switching rate of the precoding weights, leading to the classes of block-level and symbol-level precoding and 2) the number of users that each stream is addressed to, hence unicast, multicast, and broadcast precoding. Furthermore, the classified techniques are compared through representative numerical results to demonstrate their relative performance and uncover fundamental insights. Finally, a list of open theoretical problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire further research in this area.(1)

Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio and addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example, prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, and multiplexing of 8 terminals). Coarse and even errorprone digital processing in the antenna paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future research are suggested.

Self-sustainability of wireless nodes in Internet-of-Things applications can be realized with the help of controlled radio frequency energy transfer (RF-ET). However, due to significant energy loss in wireless dissipation, there is a need for novel schemes to improve the end-to-end RF-ET efficiency. In this paper, first we propose a new channel model for accurately characterizing the harvested dc power at the receiver. This model incorporates the effects of nonline of sight (NLOS) component along with the other factors, such as radiation pattern of transmit and receive antennas, losses associated with different polarization of transmitting field, and efficiency of power harvester circuit. Accuracy of the model is verified via experimental studies in an anechoic chamber (a controlled environment). Supported by experiments in controlled environment, we also formulate an optimization problem by accounting for the effect of NLOS component to maximize the RF-ET efficiency, which cannot be captured by the Friis formula. To solve this nonconvex problem, we present a computationally efficient golden section-based iterative algorithm. Finally, through extensive RF-ET measurements in different practical field environments we obtain the statistical parameters for Rician fading as well as path loss factor associated with shadow fading model, which also asserts the fact that Rayleigh fading is not well suited for RF-ET due to presence of a strong line of sight component.

We study the joint unicast and multi-group multicast transmission in massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We consider a system model that accounts for channel estimation and pilot contamination, and derive achievable spectral efficiencies (SEs) for unicast and multicast user terminals (UTs), under maximum ratio transmission and zero-forcing precoding. For unicast transmission, our objective is to maximize the weighted sum SE of the unicast UTs, and for the multicast transmission, our objective is to maximize the minimum SE of the multicast UTs. These two objectives are coupled in a conflicting manner, due to their shared power resource. Therefore, we formulate a multiobjective optimization problem (MOOP) for the two conflicting objectives. We derive the Pareto boundary of the MOOP analytically. As each Pareto optimal point describes a particular efficient trade-off between the two objectives of the system, we determine the values of the system parameters (uplink training powers, downlink transmission powers, etc.) to achieve any desired Pareto optimal point. Moreover, we prove that the Pareto region is convex, hence the system should serve the unicast and multicast UTs at the same time-frequency resource. Finally, we validate our results using numerical simulations.

This paper analyzes the performance of linearly precoded time division duplex based multi-user massive MIMO downlink system under joint impacts of channel non-reciprocity (NRC) and imperfect channel state information. We consider a generic and realistic NRC model that accounts for transceiver frequency-response as well as mutual coupling mismatches at both user equipment (UE) and base station (BS) sides. The analysis covers two most prominent forms of linear precoding schemes, namely, zero-forcing (ZF) and maximum-ratio transmission (MRT), and assumes that only the statistical properties of the beamformed channel are used at the UE side to decode the received signal. Under the approximation of i.i.d. Gaussian channels, closed-form analytical expressions are derived for the effective signal to interference and noise ratios (SINRs) and the corresponding capacity lower bounds. The expressions show that, in moderate to high SNR, the additional interference caused by imperfect NRC calibration can degrade the performance of both precoders significantly. Moreover, ZF is shown to be more sensitive to NRC than MRT. Numerical evaluations with practical NRC levels indicate that this performance loss in the spectral efficiency can be as high as 42% for ZF, whereas it is typically less than 13% for MRT. It is also shown that due to the NRC, the asymptotic large-antenna performance of both precoders saturate to an identical finite level. The derived analytical expressions provide useful tools and valuable technical insight, e.g., into calculating the NRC calibration requirements in BSs and UEs for any given specific performance targets in terms of effective SINR or the system capacity bound.

Massive MIMO (MM) is one of the leading technologies that can cater for very high capacity demand. However, energy consumption of MM systems needs to be load adaptive in order to cope with the significant temporal load variations (TLV) over a day. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic model for studying load adaptive multicell massive MIMO system where each base station (BS) adapts the number of antennas to the TLV in order to maximize the downlink energy efficiency (EE). The utility function considered here is defined as the number of bits transferred per Joule of energy. In order to incorporate the TLV, the load at each BS is modeled as an M/G/m/m state dependent queue under the assumption that the network is dimensioned to serve a maximum number of users at the peak load. The EE maximization problem is formulated in a game theoretic framework where the number of antennas to be used by a BS is determined through the best response iteration. This load adaptive system achieves around 24% higher EE and saves around 40% energy compared to a baseline system where the BSs always run with the fixed number of antennas that is most energy efficient at the peak load and that can be switched OFF when there is no traffic.

In this letter, we introduce a novel pilot designapproach that minimizes the total mean square errors of theminimum mean square error estimators of all base stations (BSs)subject to the transmit power constraints of individual users inthe network, while tackling the pilot contamination in multicellmassive MIMO systems. First, we decompose the originalnon-convex problem into distributed optimization sub-problemsat individual BSs, where each BS can optimize its own pilotsignals given the knowledge of pilot signals from the remainingBSs. We then introduce a successive optimization approach totransform each optimization sub-problem into a linear matrixinequality form, which is convex and can be solved by availableoptimization packages. Simulation results confirm the fast convergenceof the proposed approach and prevails a benchmarkscheme in terms of providing higher accuracy.

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 tes

We illustrate the potential of Massive MIMO for communication with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We consider a scenario, where multiple single-antenna UAVs simultaneously communicate with a ground station (GS) equipped with a large number of antennas. Specifically, we discuss the achievable uplink (UAV to GS) capacity performance in the case of line-of-sight conditions. We develop a realistic geometric model, which incorporates an arbitrary orientation, of the GS and UAV antenna elements to characterize the polarization mismatch loss, which occurs due to the movement and orientation of the UAVs. A closed-form expression for a lower bound on the ergodic rate for a maximum-ratio combining receiver with estimated channel state information is derived. The optimal antenna spacing that maximizes the ergodic rate achieved by an UAV is also determined for uniform linear and rectangular arrays. It is shown that when the UAVs are spherically uniformly distributed around the GS, the ergodic rate per UAV is maximized for an antenna spacing equal to an integer multiple of one-half wavelength.

In this paper, we study the effect of channel aging on the uplink and downlink performance of an FDD massive MIMO system, as the system dimension increases. Since the training duration scales linearly with the number of transmit dimensions, channel estimates become increasingly outdated in the communication phase, leading to performance degradation. To quantify this degradation, we first derive bounds on the mean squared channel estimation error. We use the bounds to derive deterministic equivalents of the receive SINRs, which yields a lower bound on the achievable uplink and downlink spectral efficiencies. For the uplink, we consider maximal ratio combining and MMSE detectors, while for the downlink, we consider matched filter and regularized zero forcing precoders. We show that the effect of channel aging can be mitigated by optimally choosing the frame duration. It is found that using all the base station antennas can lead to negligibly small achievable rates in high user mobility scenarios. Finally, numerical results are presented to validate the accuracy of our expressions and illustrate the dependence of the performance on the system dimension and channel aging parameters.

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This paper considers pilot design to mitigate pilot contamination and provide good service for everyone in multi-cell Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. Instead of modeling the pilot design as a combinatorial assignment problem, as in prior works, we express the pilot signals using a pilot basis and treat the associated power coefficients as continuous optimization variables. We compute a lower bound on the uplink capacity for Rayleigh fading channels with maximum ratio detection that applies with arbitrary pilot signals. We further formulate the max-min fairness problem under power budget constraints, with the pilot signals and data powers as optimization variables. Because this optimization problem is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard due to signomial constraints, we then propose an algorithm to obtain a local optimum with polynomial complexity. Our framework serves as a benchmark for pilot design in scenarios with either ideal or non-ideal hardware. Numerical results manifest that the proposed optimization algorithms are close to the optimal solution obtained by exhaustive search for different pilot assignments and the new pilot structure and optimization bring large gains over the state-of-the-art suboptimal pilot design.

The capacity of cellular networks can be improved by the unprecedented array gain and spatial multiplexing offered by Massive MIMO. Since its inception, the coherent interference caused by pilot contamination has been believed to create a finite capacity limit, as the number of antennas goes to infinity. In this paper, we prove that this is incorrect and an artifact from using simplistic channel models and suboptimal precoding/combining schemes. We show that with multicell MMSE precoding/combining and a tiny amount of spatial channel correlation or large-scale fading variations over the array, the capacity increases without bound as the number of antennas increases, even under pilot contamination. More precisely, the result holds when the channel covariance matrices of the contaminating users are asymptotically linearly independent, which is generally the case. If also the diagonals of the covariance matrices are linearly independent, it is sufficient to know these diagonals (and not the full covariance matrices) to achieve an unlimited asymptotic capacity.

We design a jamming-resistant receiver scheme to enhance the robustness of a massive MIMO uplink system against jamming. We assume that a jammer attacks the system both in the pilot and data transmission phases. The key feature of the proposed scheme is that, in the pilot phase, the base station estimates not only the legitimate channel, but also the jamming channel by exploiting a purposely unused pilot sequence. The jamming channel estimate is used to construct linear receiver filters that reject the impact of the jamming signal. The performance of the proposed scheme is analytically evaluated using the asymptotic properties of massive MIMO. The best regularized zero-forcing receiver and the optimal power allocations for the legitimate system and the jammer are also studied. Numerical results are provided to verify our analysis and show that the proposed scheme greatly improves the achievable rates, as compared with conventional receivers. Interestingly, the proposed scheme works particularly well under strong jamming attacks, since the improved estimate of the jamming channel outweighs the extra jamming power.

We present a method for jamming a time-division duplex link using a transceiver with a large number of antennas. By utilizing beamforming, a jammer with M antennas can degrade the spectral efficiency of the primary link more than conventional omnidirectional jammers under the same power constraint, or perform equally well with approximately 1/M of the output power. The jammer operates without any prior knowledge of channels to the legitimate transmitters, or the legitimate signals by relying on channel reciprocity.

A new state-of-the-art multi-cell minimum mean square error (M-MMSE) scheme is proposed for massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) networks, which includes an uplink MMSE detector and a downlink MMSE precoder. Contrary to conventional single-cell schemes that suppress interference using only channel estimates for intra-cell users, our scheme shows the optimal way to suppress both intra-cell and inter-cell interference instantaneously by fully utilizing the available pilot resources. Specifically, let K and B denote the number of users per cell and the number of orthogonal pilot sequences in the network, respectively, where beta = B/K is the pilot reuse factor. Our scheme utilizes all B channel directions that can be estimated locally at each base station, to actively suppress both intra-cell and inter-cell interference. Our scheme is practical and general, since power control, imperfect channel estimation, and arbitrary pilot allocation are all accounted for. Simulations show that significant spectral efficiency (SE) gains are obtained over the conventional single-cell MMSE scheme and the multi-cell zero-forcing (ZF) scheme. Furthermore, large-scale approximations of the uplink and downlink signal-to-interference-and-noise ratios (SINRs) are derived, which are tight in the large-system limit. These approximations are easy to compute and very accurate even for small system dimensions. Using these SINR approximations, a low-complexity power control algorithm is further proposed to maximize the sum SE.

Proximity-based applications are becoming fast growing markets suggesting that device-to-device (D2D) communications is becoming an essential part of the future mobile data networks. We propose scalable admission and power control methods for D2D communications underlay cellular networks to increase the reuse of frequency resources and thus network capacity while maintaining QoS to all users. In practice, as D2D communications will generate a new layer of interference, it is essential to take D2D interference into account in inter-cell interference coordination for multi-cell communications. The aim of the proposed methods is to maximize the number of D2D links under QoS constraints, therefore maximizing network frequency reuse in a practical 5G multi-cell environment. Different schemes are designed for applications that have different levels of complexity and availability of channel state information. Numerical results show that by using D2D and the proposed multi-cell interference coordination and low power transmission method, the network spectral efficiency can be increased by as much as ten times, while low outage probability can be assured to provide QoS for all users.

We consider the Massive Multiple-Input MultipleOutput 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.

Although block compressive sensing (BCS) makes it tractable to sense large-sized images and video, its recovery performance has yet to be significantly improved because its recovered images or video usually suffer from blurred edges, loss of details, and high-frequency oscillatory artifacts, especially at a low subrate. This paper addresses these problems by designing a modified total variation technique that employs multi-block gradient processing, a denoised Lagrangian multiplier, and patch-based sparse representation. In the case of video, the proposed recovery method is able to exploit both spatial and temporal similarities. Simulation results confirm the improved performance of the proposed method for compressive sensing of images and video in terms of both objective and subjective qualities.

The characterization of the global maximum of energy efficiency (EE) problems in wireless networks is a challenging problem due to their nonconvex nature in interference channels. The aim of this paper is to develop a new and general framework to achieve globally optimal solutions. First, the hidden monotonic structure of the most common EE maximization problems is exploited jointly with fractional programming theory to obtain globally optimal solutions with exponential complexity in the number of network links. To overcome the high complexity, we also propose a framework to compute suboptimal power control strategies with affordable complexity. This is achieved by merging fractional programming and sequential optimization. The proposed monotonic framework is used to shed light on the ultimate performance of wireless networks in terms of EE and also to benchmark the performance of the lower-complexity framework based on sequential programming. Numerical evidence is provided to show that the sequential fractional programming framework achieves global optimality in several practical communication scenarios.

The massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has great potential to manage the rapid growth of wireless data traffic. Massive MIMO achieves tremendous spectral efficiency by spatial multiplexing many tens of user equipments (UEs). These gains are only achieved in practice if many more UEs can connect efficiently to the network than today. As the number of UEs increases, while each UE intermittently accesses the network, the random access functionality becomes essential to share the limited number of pilots among the UEs. In this paper, we revisit the random access problem in the Massive MIMO context and develop a reengineered protocol, termed strongest-user collision resolution (SUCRe). An accessing UE asks for a dedicated pilot by sending an uncoordinated random access pilot, with a risk that other UEs send the same pilot. The favorable propagation of massive MIMO channels is utilized to enable distributed collision detection at each UE, thereby determining the strength of the contenders signals and deciding to repeat the pilot if the UE judges that its signal at the receiver is the strongest. The SUCRe protocol resolves the vast majority of all pilot collisions in crowded urban scenarios and continues to admit UEs efficiently in overloaded networks.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) refers to a high-density network of low-cost, low-bitrate terminals and sensors where low energy consumption is also one central feature. As the power budget of classical receiver chains is dominated by the high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), there is a growing interest toward deploying receiver architectures with reduced bit or even 1-bit ADCs. In this paper, we study waveform design, optimization, and detection aspects of multiuser massive MIMO downlink, where user terminals adopt very simple 1-bit ADCs with oversampling. In order to achieve spectral efficiency higher than 1 bit/s/Hz per real dimension, and per receiver antenna, we propose a two-stage precoding structure, namely, a novel quantization precoder followed by maximum-ratio transmission or zero-forcing-type spatial channel precoder which jointly form the multiuser multiantenna transmit waveform. The quantization precoder outputs are designed and optimized, under appropriate transmitter and receiver filter bandwidth constraints, to provide controlled intersymbol interference enabling the input symbols to be uniquely detected from 1-bit quantized observations with a low-complexity symbol detector in the absence of noise. An additional optimization constraint is also imposed in the quantization precoder design to increase the robustness against noise and residual interuser interference (IUI). The purpose of the spatial channel precoder, in turn, is to suppress the IUI and provide high beamforming gains such that good symbol error rates can be achieved in the presence of noise and interference. Extensive numerical evaluations illustrate that the proposed spatio-temporal precoder-based multiantenna waveform design can facilitate good multiuser link performance, despite the extremely simple 1-bitADCsin the receivers, hence being one possible enabling technology for the future low-complexity IoT networks.

This letter proposes anti-jamming strategies based on pilot retransmission for a single user uplink massive MIMO under jamming attack. A jammer is assumed to attack the system both in the training and data transmission phases. We first derive an achievable rate which enables us to analyze the effect of jamming attacks on the system performance. Counter-attack strategies are then proposed to mitigate this effect under two different scenarios: random and deterministic jamming attacks. Numerical results illustrate our analysis and benefit of the proposed schemes.

This paper considers the jointly optimal pilot and data power allocation in single-cell uplink massive multiple-input-multiple- output systems. Using the spectral efficiency (SE) as performance metric and setting a total energy budget per coherence interval, the power control is formulated as optimization problems for two different objective functions: the weighted minimum SE among the users and the weighted sum SE. A closed form solution for the optimal length of the pilot sequence is derived. The optimal power control policy for the former problem is found by solving a simple equation with a single variable. Utilizing the special structure arising from imperfect channel estimation, a convex reformulation is found to solve the latter problem to global optimality in polynomial time. The gain of the optimal joint power control is theoretically justified, and is proved to be large in the low-SNR regime. Simulation results also show the advantage of optimizing the power control over both pilot and data power, as compared to the cases of using full power and of only optimizing the data powers as done in previous work.

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) stand for a significant part of the total power consumption in a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) base station. One-bit ADCs are one way to reduce power consumption. This paper presents an analysis of the spectral efficiency of single-carrier and orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) transmission in massive MIMO systems that use one-bit ADCs. A closed-form achievable rate, i.e., a lower bound on capacity, is derived for a wideband system with a large number of channel taps that employ low-complexity linear channel estimation and symbol detection. Quantization results in two types of error in the symbol detection. The circularly symmetric error becomes Gaussian in massive MIMO and vanishes as the number of antennas grows. The amplitude distortion, which severely degrades the performance of OFDM, is caused by variations between symbol durations in received interference energy. As the number of channel taps grows, the amplitude distortion vanishes and OFDM has the same performance as single-carrier transmission. A main conclusion of this paper is that wideband massive MIMO systems work well with one-bit ADCs.

In this paper, we investigate the coexistence of two technologies that have been put forward for the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks, namely, network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications and massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output). Potential benefits of both technologies are known individually, but the tradeoffs resulting from their coexistence have not been adequately addressed. To this end, we assume that D2D users reuse the downlink resources of cellular networks in an underlay fashion. In addition, multiple antennas at the BS are used in order to obtain precoding gains and simultaneously support multiple cellular users using multiuser or massive MIMO technique. Two metrics are considered, namely the average sum rate (ASR) and energy efficiency (EE). We derive tractable and directly computable expressions and study the tradeoffs between the ASR and EE as functions of the number of BS antennas, the number of cellular users and the density of D2D users within a given coverage area. Our results show that both the ASR and EE behave differently in scenarios with low and high density of D2D users, and that coexistence of underlay D2D communications and massive MIMO is mainly beneficial in low densities of D2D users.

We consider the uplink of a cellular massive multiple-input multiple-output network. Acquiring channel state information at the base stations (BSs) requires uplink pilot signaling. Since the number of orthogonal pilot sequences is limited by the channel coherence, pilot reuse across cells is necessary to achieve high spectral efficiency. However, finding efficient pilot reuse patterns is non-trivial, especially in practical asymmetric BS deployments. We approach this problem using the coalitional game theory. Each BS has a few unique pilots and can form coalitions with other BSs to gain access to more pilots. The BSs in a coalition, thus, benefit from serving more users in their cells at the expense of higher pilot contamination and interference. Given that a cells average spectral efficiency depends on the overall pilot reuse pattern, the suitable coalitional game model is in the partition form. We develop a low-complexity distributed coalition formation based on individual stability. By incorporating a BS intercommunication budget constraint, we are able to control the overhead in message exchange between the BSs and ensure the algorithms convergence to a solution of the game called individually stable coalition structure. Simulation results reveal fast algorithmic convergence and substantial performance gains over the baseline schemes with no pilot reuse, full pilot reuse, or random pilot reuse pattern.

This paper investigates the joint power allocationand user association problem in multi-cell Massive MIMO(multiple-input multiple-output) downlink (DL) systems. Thetarget is to minimize the total transmit power consumptionwhen each user is served by an optimized subset of the basestations (BSs), using non-coherent joint transmission. We firstderive a lower bound on the ergodic spectral efficiency (SE),which is applicable for any channel distribution and precodingscheme. Closed-form expressions are obtained for Rayleigh fadingchannels with either maximum ratio transmission (MRT) or zeroforcing (ZF) precoding. From these bounds, we further formulatethe DL power minimization problems with fixed SE constraintsfor the users. These problems are proved to be solvable aslinear programs, giving the optimal power allocation and BS-user association with low complexity. Furthermore, we formulatea max-min fairness problem which maximizes the worst SEamong the users, and we show that it can be solved as aquasi-linear program. Simulations manifest that the proposedmethods provide good SE for the users using less transmit powerthan in small-scale systems and the optimal user associationcan effectively balance the load between BSs when needed.Even though our framework allows the joint transmission frommultiple BSs, there is an overwhelming probability that only oneBS is associated with each user at the optimal solution.

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer techniques for multiway massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay networks are investigated. By using two practically viable relay receiver designs, namely 1) the power splitting receiver and 2) the time switching receiver, asymptotic signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) expressions are derived for an unlimited number of antennas at the relay. These asymptotic SINRs are then used to derive asymptotic symmetric sum rate expressions in closed form. Notably, these asymptotic SINRs and sum rates become independent of radio frequency-to-direct current (RF-to-DC) conversion efficiency in the limit of infinitely many relay antennas. Moreover, tight average sum rate approximations are derived in closed form for finitely many relay antennas. The fundamental tradeoff between the harvested energy and the sum rate is quantified for both relay receiver structures. Notably, the detrimental impact of imperfect channel state information (CSI) on the MIMO detector/precoder is investigated, and thereby, the performance degradation caused by pilot contamination, which is the residual interference due to nonorthogonal pilot sequence usage in adjacent/cochannel systems, is quantified. The presence of cochannel interference (CCI) can be exploited to be beneficial for energy harvesting at the relay, and consequently, the asymptotic harvested energy is an increasing function of the number of cochannel interferers. Notably, in the genie-aided perfect CSI case, the detrimental impact of CCI for signal decoding can be cancelled completely whenever the number of relay antennas grows without bound. Nevertheless, the pilot contamination severely degrades the sum rate performance even for infinitely many relay antennas.

What would a cellular network designed for maximal energy efficiency look like? To answer this fundamental question, tools from stochastic geometry are used in this paper to model future cellular networks and obtain a new lower bound on the average uplink spectral efficiency. This enables us to formulate a tractable uplink energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem and solve it analytically with respect to the density of base stations (BSs), the transmit power levels, the number of BS antennas and users per cell, and the pilot reuse factor. The closed-form expressions obtained from this general EE maximization framework provide valuable insights on the interplay between the optimization variables, hardware characteristics, and propagation environment. Small cells are proved to give high EE, but the EE improvement saturates quickly with the BS density. Interestingly, the maximal EE is achieved by also equipping the BSs with multiple antennas and operate in a "massive MIMO" fashion, where the array gain from coherent detection mitigates interference and the multiplexing of many users reduces the energy cost per user.

The downlink of a massive MIMO system is considered for the case in which the base station must concurrently serve two categories of terminals: one group to which imperfect instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is available and one group to which no CSI is available. Motivating applications include broadcasting of public channels and control information in wireless networks. A new technique is developed and analyzed: joint beamforming and broadcasting (JBB), by which the base station beamforms to the group of terminals to which CSI is available, and broadcasts to the other group of terminals, to which no CSI is available. The broadcast information does not interfere with the beamforming as it is placed in the nullspace of the channel matrix collectively seen by the terminals targeted by the beamforming. JBB is compared to orthogonal access (OA) by which the base station partitions the time-frequency resources into two disjunct parts, one for each group of terminals. It is shown that JBB can substantially outperform OA in terms of required total radiated power for given rate targets.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have the potential to bring tremendous improvements in spectral efficiency to future communication systems. Counterintuitively, the practical issues of having uncertain channel knowledge, high propagation losses, and implementing optimal non-linear precoding are solved more or less automatically by enlarging system dimensions. However, the computational precoding complexity grows with the system dimensions. For example, the close-to-optimal and relatively "antenna-efficient" regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoding is very complicated to implement in practice, since it requires fast inversions of large matrices in every coherence period. Motivated by the high performance of RZF, we propose to replace the matrix inversion and multiplication by a truncated polynomial expansion (TPE), thereby obtaining the new TPE precoding scheme which is more suitable for real-time hardware implementation and significantly reduces the delay to the first transmitted symbol. The degree of the matrix polynomial can be adapted to the available hardware resources and enables smooth transition between simple maximum ratio transmission and more advanced RZF. By deriving new random matrix results, we obtain a deterministic expression for the asymptotic signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) achieved by TPE precoding in massive MIMO systems. Furthermore, we provide a closed-form expression for the polynomial coefficients that maximizes this SINR. To maintain a fixed per-user rate loss as compared to RZF, the polynomial degree does not need to scale with the system, but it should be increased with the quality of the channel knowledge and the signal-to-noise ratio.

We consider the multiple input single output (MISO) Gaussian broadcast channel with N-t antennas at the base station (BS) and N-u single-antenna users in the downlink. We propose a novel user grouping precoder which improves the sum rate performance of the zero-forcing (ZF) precoder specially when the channel is ill-conditioned. The proposed precoder partitions all the users into small groups of equal size. Downlink beamforming is then done in such a way that, at each users receiver, the interference from the signal intended for users not in its group is nulled out. Intragroup interference still remains, and is cancelled through successive interference presubtraction at the BS using dirty paper coding (DPC). The proposed user grouping method is different from user selection, since it is a method for precoding of information to the selected (scheduled) users, and not for selecting which users are to be scheduled. The proposed precoder is a generalization of two special cases, one where each group has only one user (ZF precoder) and another where all users are in a single group (ZF-DP precoder). A larger group size helps improve the sum rate performance but at the cost of greater complexity. The proposed generalization, therefore, allows for tradeoff between performance and complexity.

In order to enhance the effective resolution of time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters (TI-ADCs), both linear and nonlinear channel mismatches should be carefully calibrated. This paper concentrates on a bandwidth-efficient background calibration method for nonlinear errors in M-channel TI-ADCs. It utilizes the least-mean square algorithm as well as a certain degree of oversampling to achieve adaptive mismatch tracking. The calibration performance and computational complexity are investigated and evaluated through behavioral-level simulations. Furthermore, a calibration strategy for narrow-band input signals is proposed and verified as an improvement of the basic calibration structure for such signals.

The problem of maximum likelihood (ML) detection in training-assisted single-input multiple-output (SIMO) systems with phase noise impairments is studied for two different scenarios, i.e. the case when the channel is deterministic and known (constant channel) and the case when the channel is stochastic and unknown (fading channel). Further, two different operations with respect to the phase noise sources are considered, namely, the case of identical phase noise sources and the case of independent phase noise sources over the antennas. In all scenarios the optimal detector is derived for a very general parameterization of the phase noise distribution. Further, a high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) analysis is performed to show that symbol-error-rate (SER) floors appear in all cases. The SER floor in the case of identical phase noise sources (for both constant and fading channels) is independent of the number of antenna elements. In contrast, the SER floor in the case of independent phase noise sources is reduced when increasing the number of antenna elements (for both constant and fading channels). Finally, the system model is extended to multiple data channel uses and it is shown that the conclusions are valid for these setups, as well.

To ensure safety in confined environments such as mines or subway tunnels, a (wireless) sensor network can be deployed to monitor various environmental conditions. One of its most important applications is to track personnel, mobile equipment and vehicles. However, the state-of-the-art algorithms assume that the positions of the sensors are perfectly known, which is not necessarily true due to  imprecise placement and/or dropping of sensors. Therefore, we propose an automatic approach for simultaneous refinement of sensors' positions and target tracking. We divide the considered area in a finite number of cells, define dynamic and measurement models, and apply a discrete variant of belief propagation which can efficiently solve this high-dimensional problem, and handle all non-Gaussian uncertainties expected in this kind of environments. Finally, we use ray-tracing simulation to generate an artificial mine-like environment and generate synthetic measurement data. According to our extensive simulation study, the proposed approach performs significantly better than standard Bayesian target tracking and localization algorithms, and provides robustness against outliers.

In recent years, the use of wireless systems in industrial applications has experienced spectacular growth. Unfortunately, industrial environments often present impulsive noise which degrades the reliability of wireless systems. OFDM is an enhanced technology used in industrial communication to monitor the work and movement of employees using high quality video. However, OFDM is sensitive to high amplitude impulsive noise because the noise energy spreads among all OFDM sub-carriers. This paper proposes a receiver structure consisting of two stages: a detector stage combining Fishers Quadratic discriminant and Gaussian Hypothesis techniques, and a suppression stage optimized by setting well defined thresholds. The receiver structure has been tested by simulations and measurements providing an increment in the probability of detection and improving the system performance.