Multi-user MIMO

Last updated

Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) is a set of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) technologies for multipath wireless communication, in which multiple users or terminals, each radioing over one or more antennas, communicate with one another. In contrast, single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) involves a single multi-antenna-equipped user or terminal communicating with precisely one other similarly equipped node. Analogous to how OFDMA adds multiple-access capability to OFDM in the cellular-communications realm, MU-MIMO adds multiple-user capability to MIMO in the wireless realm.

Contents

SDMA, [1] [2] [3] massive MIMO, [4] [5] coordinated multipoint (CoMP), [6] and ad hoc MIMO are all related to MU-MIMO; each of those technologies often leverages spatial degrees of freedom to separate users.

Technology

MU-MIMO leverages multiple users as spatially distributed transmission resources, at the cost of somewhat more expensive signal processing. In comparison, conventional single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) involves solely local-device multiple-antenna dimensions. MU-MIMO algorithms enhance MIMO systems where connections among users count greater than one. MU-MIMO may be generalized into two categories: MIMO broadcast channels (MIMO BC) and MIMO multiple-access channels (MIMO MAC) for downlink and uplink situations, respectively. Again in comparison, SU-MIMO may be represented as a point-to-point, pairwise MIMO.

To remove ambiguity of the words receiver and transmitter, we can adopt the terms access point (AP) or base station, and user. An AP is the transmitter and a user the receiver for downlink connections, and vice versa for uplink connections. Homogeneous networks are freed from this distinction since they tend to be bi-directional.

MIMO broadcast (MIMO BC)

Multiuser MIMO System: MIMO BC case Multiuser mimo.jpg
Multiuser MIMO System: MIMO BC case
Example of the block diagonalized real value channel matrix (8 transmit antennas at the base station, 3 user equipments). BD-CSI.png
Example of the block diagonalized real value channel matrix (8 transmit antennas at the base station, 3 user equipments).

MIMO BC represents a MIMO downlink case where a single sender transmits to multiple receivers within the wireless network. Examples of advanced-transmit processing for MIMO BC are interference-aware precoding and SDMA-based downlink user scheduling. For advanced-transmit processing, qfz has to be known at the transmitter (CSIT). That is, knowledge of CSIT allows throughput improvement, and methods to obtain CSIT become of significant importance. MIMO BC systems have an outstanding advantage over point-to-point SU-MIMO systems, especially when the number of antennas at the transmitter, or AP, is larger than the number of antennas at each receiver (user). The categories of precoding techniques which may be used by MIMO BC include, one, those using dirty paper coding (DPC) and linear techniques [7] and two, hybrid (analog and digital) techniques. [8] Precoding may also be achieved through means of a so-called steering matrix, [9] which can be applied in multiple configurations.

MIMO MAC

Conversely, the MIMO multiple-access-channel or MIMO MAC represents a MIMO uplink case in the multiple sender to single receiver wireless network. Examples of advanced receive processing for MIMO MAC are joint interference cancellation and SDMA-based uplink user scheduling. For advanced receive processing, the receiver has to know the channel state information at the receiver (CSIR). Knowing CSIR is generally easier than knowing CSIT. However, knowing CSIR costs a lot of uplink resources to transmit dedicated pilots from each user to the AP. MIMO MAC systems outperform point-to-point MIMO systems especially when the number of receiver antennas at an AP is larger than the number of transmit antennas at each user.

Cross-layer MIMO

Cross-layer MIMO enhances the performance of MIMO links by solving certain cross-layer problems that may occur when MIMO configurations are employed in a system. Cross-layer techniques can be used to enhance the performance of SISO links as well. Examples of cross-layer techniques are Joint Source-Channel Coding, Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC, or "Link Adaptation"), Hybrid ARQ (HARQ), and user scheduling.

Multi-user to multi-user

The highly interconnected wireless ad hoc network increases the flexibility of wireless networking at the cost of increased multi-user interference. To improve the interference immunity, PHY/MAC-layer protocols have evolved from competition based to cooperative based transmission and reception. Cooperative wireless communications can actually exploit interference, which includes self-interference and other user interference. In cooperative wireless communications, each node might use self-interference and other user interference to improve the performance of data encoding and decoding, whereas conventional nodes are generally directed to avoid the interference. For example, once strong interference is decodable, a node decodes and cancels the strong interference before decoding the self-signal. The mitigation of low carrier-over-interference (CoI) ratios can be implemented across PHY/MAC/Application network layers in cooperative systems.

Cooperative MIMO (CO-MIMO)

CO-MIMO, also known as network MIMO (net-MIMO), or ad hoc MIMO, uses distributed antennas which belong to other users, while conventional MIMO, i.e., single-user MIMO, only employs antennas belonging to the local terminal. CO-MIMO improves the performance of a wireless network by introducing multiple-antenna advantages, such as diversity, multiplexing and beamforming. If the main interest hinges on the diversity gain, it is known as cooperative diversity. It can be described as a form of macro-diversity, used for example in soft handover. Cooperative MIMO corresponds to transmitter macro-diversity or simulcasting. A simple form that does not require any advanced signal processing is single frequency networks (SFN), used especially in wireless broadcasting. SFNs combined with channel adaptive or traffic adaptive scheduling is called dynamic single frequency networks (DSFN).

CO-MIMO is a technique useful for future cellular networks which consider wireless mesh networking or wireless ad hoc networking. In wireless ad hoc networks, multiple transmit nodes communicate with multiple receive nodes. To optimize the capacity of ad hoc channels, MIMO concepts and techniques can be applied to multiple links between the transmit and receive node clusters. Contrasted to multiple antennas in a single-user MIMO transceiver, participating nodes and their antennas are located in a distributed manner. So, to achieve the capacity of this network, techniques to manage distributed radio resources are essential. Strategies such as autonomous interference cognition, node cooperation, and network coding with dirty paper coding have been suggested to optimize wireless network capacity.

See also

Related Research Articles

In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two terminals connected to the same transmission medium to transmit over it and to share its capacity. Examples of shared physical media are wireless networks, bus networks, ring networks and point-to-point links operating in half-duplex mode.

4G is the fourth generation of broadband cellular network technology, succeeding 3G and preceding 5G. A 4G system must provide capabilities defined by ITU in IMT Advanced. Potential and current applications include amended mobile web access, IP telephony, gaming services, high-definition mobile TV, video conferencing, and 3D television.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access</span> Multi-user version of OFDM digital modulation

Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) is a multi-user version of the popular orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) digital modulation scheme. Multiple access is achieved in OFDMA by assigning subsets of subcarriers to individual users. This allows simultaneous low-data-rate transmission from several users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E-UTRA</span> 3GPP interface

E-UTRA is the air interface of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) upgrade path for mobile networks. It is an acronym for Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access, also known as the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access in early drafts of the 3GPP LTE specification. E-UTRAN is the combination of E-UTRA, user equipment (UE), and a Node B.

In the field of wireless communication, macrodiversity is a kind of space diversity scheme using several receiver or transmitter antennas for transferring the same signal. The distance between the transmitters is much longer than the wavelength, as opposed to microdiversity where the distance is in the order of or shorter than the wavelength.

In telecommunications, a diversity scheme refers to a method for improving the reliability of a message signal by using two or more communication channels with different characteristics. Diversity is mainly used in radio communication and is a common technique for combatting fading and co-channel interference and avoiding error bursts. It is based on the fact that individual channels experience fades and interference at different, random times, i.e., they are at least partly independent. Multiple versions of the same signal may be transmitted and/or received and combined in the receiver. Alternatively, a redundant forward error correction code may be added and different parts of the message transmitted over different channels. Diversity techniques may exploit the multipath propagation, resulting in a diversity gain, often measured in decibels.

Radio resource management (RRM) is the system level management of co-channel interference, radio resources, and other radio transmission characteristics in wireless communication systems, for example cellular networks, wireless local area networks, wireless sensor systems, and radio broadcasting networks. RRM involves strategies and algorithms for controlling parameters such as transmit power, user allocation, beamforming, data rates, handover criteria, modulation scheme, error coding scheme, etc. The objective is to utilize the limited radio-frequency spectrum resources and radio network infrastructure as efficiently as possible.

Precoding is a generalization of beamforming to support multi-stream transmission in multi-antenna wireless communications. In conventional single-stream beamforming, the same signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with appropriate weighting such that the signal power is maximized at the receiver output. When the receiver has multiple antennas, single-stream beamforming cannot simultaneously maximize the signal level at all of the receive antennas. In order to maximize the throughput in multiple receive antenna systems, multi-stream transmission is generally required.

In telecommunications, dirty paper coding (DPC) or Costa precoding is a technique for efficient transmission of digital data through a channel subjected to some interference known to the transmitter. The technique consists of precoding the data in order to cancel the interference. Dirty-paper coding achieves the channel capacity without a power penalty and without requiring the receiver to know the interfering signal.

Cooperative diversity is a cooperative multiple antenna technique for improving or maximising total network channel capacities for any given set of bandwidths which exploits user diversity by decoding the combined signal of the relayed signal and the direct signal in wireless multihop networks. A conventional single hop system uses direct transmission where a receiver decodes the information only based on the direct signal while regarding the relayed signal as interference, whereas the cooperative diversity considers the other signal as contribution. That is, cooperative diversity decodes the information from the combination of two signals. Hence, it can be seen that cooperative diversity is an antenna diversity that uses distributed antennas belonging to each node in a wireless network. Note that user cooperation is another definition of cooperative diversity. User cooperation considers an additional fact that each user relays the other user's signal while cooperative diversity can be also achieved by multi-hop relay networking systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carrier interferometry</span>

Carrier Interferometry(CI) is a spread spectrum scheme designed to be used in an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication system for multiplexing and multiple access, enabling the system to support multiple users at the same time over the same frequency band.

In radio, cooperative multiple-input multiple-output is a technology that can effectively exploit the spatial domain of mobile fading channels to bring significant performance improvements to wireless communication systems. It is also called network MIMO, distributed MIMO, virtual MIMO, and virtual antenna arrays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MIMO</span> Use of multiple antennas in radio

In radio, multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) is a method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmission and receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation. MIMO has become an essential element of wireless communication standards including IEEE 802.11n, IEEE 802.11ac, HSPA+ (3G), WiMAX, and Long Term Evolution (LTE). More recently, MIMO has been applied to power-line communication for three-wire installations as part of the ITU G.hn standard and of the HomePlug AV2 specification.

3G MIMO describes MIMO techniques which have been considered as 3G standard techniques.

Many antennas is a smart antenna technique which overcomes the performance limitation of single user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. In cellular communication, the maximum number of considered antennas for downlink is 2 and 4 to support 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and IMT Advanced requirements, respectively. Since the available spectrum band will probably be limited while the data rate requirement will continuously increase beyond IMT-A to support the mobile multimedia services, it is highly probable that the number of transmit antennas at the base station must be increased to 8–64 or more. The installation of many antennas at single base stations introduced many challenges and required development of several high technologies: a new SDMA engine, a new beamforming algorithm and a new antenna array.

Zero-forcing precoding is a method of spatial signal processing by which a multiple antenna transmitter can null the multiuser interference in a multi-user MIMO wireless communication system. When the channel state information is perfectly known at the transmitter, the zero-forcing precoder is given by the pseudo-inverse of the channel matrix. Zero-forcing has been used in LTE mobile networks.

International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced are the requirements issued by the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2008 for what is marketed as 4G mobile phone and Internet access service.

Multiple-input, multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) is the dominant air interface for 4G and 5G broadband wireless communications. It combines multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) technology, which multiplies capacity by transmitting different signals over multiple antennas, and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), which divides a radio channel into a large number of closely spaced subchannels to provide more reliable communications at high speeds. Research conducted during the mid-1990s showed that while MIMO can be used with other popular air interfaces such as time-division multiple access (TDMA) and code-division multiple access (CDMA), the combination of MIMO and OFDM is most practical at higher data rates.

Per-user unitary rate control (PU2RC) is a multi-user MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) scheme. PU2RC uses both transmission pre-coding and multi-user scheduling. By doing that, the network capacity is further enhanced than the capacity of the single-user MIMO scheme.

Resource Unit (RU) is a unit in OFDMA terminology used in 802.11ax WLAN to denote a group of 78.125 kHz bandwidth subcarriers (tones) used in both DownLink (DL) and UpLink (UL) transmissions. With OFDMA, different transmit powers may be applied to different RUs. There are maximum of 9 RUs for 20 MHz bandwidth, 18 in case of 40 MHz and more in case of 80 or 160 MHz bandwidth. The RUs enables an Access Point station to allow WLAN stations to access it simultaneously and efficiently.

References

  1. ↑ N. Jindal, MIMO Broadcast Channels with Finite Rate Feedback, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 52, no. 11, pp. 5045–5059, 2006.
  2. ↑ D. Gesbert, M. Kountouris, R.W. Heath Jr., C.-B. Chae, and T. Sälzer, Shifting the MIMO Paradigm, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 36-46, 2007.
  3. ↑ R. Tweg, R. Alpert, H. Leizerovich, A. Steiner, E. Levitan, E. Offir-Arad, A.B. Guy, B. Zickel, A. Aviram, A. Frieman, M. Wax, ASIC Implementation of Beamforming and SDMA for WiFi Metropolitan-Area Deployment, Global Telecommunications Conference, 2006. GLOBECOM '06. IEEE.
  4. ↑ T. L. Marzetta, Noncooperative Cellular Wireless with Unlimited Numbers of Base Station Antennas IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 9, no. 11, pp. 56-61, 3590-3600, Nov. 2010.
  5. ↑ J. Hoydis, S. ten Brink, M. Debbah, Massive MIMO in the UL/DL of Cellular Networks: How Many Antennas Do We Need? IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 160-171, Feb. 2013.
  6. ↑ E. Björnson and E. Jorswieck, Optimal Resource Allocation in Coordinated Multi-Cell Systems, Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory, vol. 9, no. 2-3, pp. 113-381, 2013.
  7. ↑ Q. Spencer; M. Haardt & A. L. Swindlehurst (February 2004). "Zero-Forcing Methods for Downlink Spatial Multiplexing in Multi-User MIMO Channels". IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 52 (2): 461. Bibcode:2004ITSP...52..461S. doi:10.1109/TSP.2003.821107. S2CID   616082.
  8. ↑ Vizziello, A., Savazzi, P., & Chowdhury, K. R. (2018). A Kalman Based Hybrid Precoding for Multi-User Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems. IEEE Access, 6, 55712-55722.
  9. ↑ "Meilhac, Lisa, and Ahmad Bazzi. "Pre-coding steering matrix for MU-MIMO communication systems." U.S. Patent 10,686,500, issued June 16, 2020".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.