Efficient Constant Envelope Precoding for Massive MU-MIMO Downlink via Majorization-Minimization Method.

The practical implementation of massive multi-user multi-input-multi-output (MU-MIMO) downlink communication systems power amplifiers that are energy efficient; otherwise, the power consumption of the base station (BS) will be prohibitive. Constant envelope (CE) precoding is gaining increasing interest for its capability to utilize low-cost, high-efficiency nonlinear radio frequency amplifiers. Our work focuses on the topic of CE precoding in massive MU-MIMO systems and presents an efficient CE precoding algorithm. This algorithm uses an alternating minimization (AltMin) framework to optimize the CE precoded signal and precoding factor, aiming to minimize the difference between the received signal and the transmit symbol. For the optimization of the CE precoded signal, we provide a powerful approach that integrates the majorization-minimization (MM) method and the fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding (FISTA) method. This algorithm combines the characteristics of the massive MU-MIMO channel with the second-order Taylor expansion to construct the surrogate function in the MM method, in which minimizing this surrogate function is the worst-case of the system. Specifically, we expand the suggested CE precoding algorithm to involve the discrete constant envelope (DCE) precoding case. In addition, we thoroughly examine the exact property, convergence, and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CE precoding algorithm can achievean uncoded biterror rate (BER) performance gain of roughly 1dB compared to the existing CE precoding algorithm and has an acceptable computational complexity. This performance advantage also exists when it comes to DCE precoding.

Adaptive Beam Splitting-Based Broadband Hybrid Precoding for Terahertz Massive MIMO.

Terahertz massive MIMO systems can be used in the local area network (LAN) scene of maritime communication and has great application prospects. To solve the problems of excessive beam training overhead in beam tracking and beam splitting in beam aggregation, a broadband hybrid precoding (HP) is proposed. First, an additional delayer is introduced between each phase shifter and the corresponding antenna in the classical sub-connected HP structure. Then, by precisely designing the time delay of the delayer and the phase shift of the phase shifter, broadband beams with flexible and controllable coverage can be generated. Finally, the simulation results verify that the proposed HP can achieve fast-tracking and high-energy-efficient communication for multiple mobile users.

Efficient Precoding and Power Allocation Techniques for Maximizing Spectral Efficiency in Beamspace MIMO-NOMA Systems.

Beamspace MIMO-NOMA is an effective way to improve spectral efficiency. This paper focuses on a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission scheme for a beamspace multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. To increase the sum rate, we jointly optimize precoding and power allocation, which presents a non-convex problem. To solve this difficulty, we employ an alternating algorithm to optimize the precoding and power allocation. Regarding the precoding subproblem, we demonstrate that the original optimization problem can be transformed into an unconstrained optimization problem. Drawing inspiration from fraction programming (FP), we reconstruct the problem and derive a closed-form expression of the optimization variable. In addition, we effectively reduce the complexity of precoding by utilizing Neumann series expansion (NSE). For the power allocation subproblem, we adopt a dynamic power allocation scheme that considers both the intra-beam power optimization and the inter-beam power optimization. Simulation results show that the energy efficiency of the proposed beamspace MIMO-NOMA is significantly better than other conventional schemes.

Robust Precoding for Multi-User Visible Light Communications with Quantized Channel Information.

In this paper, we address the design of multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) precoders for indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems. The goal is to minimize the transmitted optical power per light emitting diode (LED) under imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. Robust precoders for imperfect CSI available in the literature include noisy and outdated channel estimation cases. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has considered adding robustness against channel quantization. In this paper, we fill this gap by addressing the case of imperfect CSI due to the quantization of VLC channels. We model the quantization errors in the CSI through polyhedric uncertainty regions. For polyhedric uncertainty regions and positive real channels, as is the case of VLC channels, we show that the robust precoder against channel quantization errors that minimizes the transmitted optical power while guaranteeing a target signal to noise plus interference ratio (SNIR) per user is the solution of a second order cone programming (SOCP) problem. Finally, we evaluate its performance under different quantization levels through numerical simulations.

Novel Receive Antenna Selection Scheme for Precoding-Aided Spatial Modulation with Lattice Reduction.

In this paper, a new receive antenna subset (RAS) selection scheme is proposed for precoding-aided spatial modulation (PSM). First, a lattice reduction (LR)-based precoder is employed instead of a conventional zero-forcing (ZF) precoder. It is analytically shown that a full diversity gain can be achieved by the LR-based ZF precoder without RAS selection. Then, an optimal LR-based RAS selection criterion is derived for the over-determined LR-based PSM systems, and a suboptimal selection algorithm is additionally presented. It is also shown that optimal and suboptimal RAS selection algorithms based on LR improve the BER performance of the LR-based PSM system. Further, the overall diversity order of the over-determined LR-based PSM systems with optimal LR-based RAS selection is analyzed. Finally, diversity analysis and simulation results show that the LR-ZF-based PSM system with optimal LR-based RAS selection outperforms the conventional ZF-based PSM system with conventional optimal RAS selection.

Closed-Form Power Normalization Methods for a Satellite MIMO System.

The paper proposes a new set of normalization techniques for precoding/beamforming matrices applicable to broadband multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) satellite systems. The proposed techniques adapt known normalization methods to account for the signal attenuation experienced by users due to the degradation of antenna gain and free space losses towards the edge of the coverage. We use, as an example, an array-fed reflector (AFR) antenna onboard a satellite in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), which provides a favorable trade-off between high-directivity, reconfigurability, and the requirement for digital processing, but suffers from high scan losses away from broadside due to optical aberrations when considered for global coverage applications. Three different precoding/beamforming techniques are employed, namely zero forcing (ZF), minimum mean squared error (MMSE), and matched filtering (MF). Low-complexity power normalization techniques digitally applied after the beamformer are introduced that, in the absence of any atmospheric effects, lead to iso-flux-like characteristics whilst satisfying the power constraint per feed. In comparison with other methods reported in the literature, mainly based on iterative algorithms, the proposed techniques consist in closed-form expressions to provide uniform signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal-to-noise plus interference ratio (SNIR) across the users without significant impact on the payload sum rate. Numerical results are presented to comparatively demonstrate the achieved performance in terms of total capacity and distribution of SNR and SNIR at various noise and interference scenarios.

A Low Sampling Rate Receiver Design for Multi-Antenna Multi-User OFDM Systems.

The future 6G mobile communication network will support an unprecedented amount of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which will boost the demand for low cost terminals under the principle of green communication. One of the critical issues for low cost terminals is the sampling rate of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the receivers. A high sampling rate of the ADC gives rise to a high energy consumption and high hardware cost for the terminal. In the conventional multi-user OFDM systems, all users have to sample the received signal with a sampling rate that is larger than or equal to the Nyquist rate, despite only a small fraction of the bandwidth (number of subcarriers) is allocated to each user. This paper proposes a low sampling rate receiver design for multi-antenna multi-user OFDM systems. With the aid of zero-forcing precoding, the sampling rate of the receiver can be reduced to 1/K of the Nyquist rate, where K is the number of users. The simulation results show that with a significant reduction in sampling rate, performance loss is insignificant and acceptable in terms of bit error rate, mutual information and peak-to-average power ratio.

PCQNet: A Trainable Feedback Scheme of Precoder for the Uplink Multi-User MIMO Systems.

Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology can significantly improve the spectral and energy efficiencies of wireless networks. In the uplink MU-MIMO systems, the optimal precoder design at the base station utilizes the Lagrange multipliers method and the centralized iterative algorithm to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) of all users under the power constraint. The precoding matrices need to be fed back to the user equipment to explore the potential benefits of the joint transceiver design. We propose a CNN-based compression network named PCQNet to minimize the feedback overhead. We first illustrate the effect of the trainable compression ratios and feedback bits on the MSE between the original precoding matrices and the recovered ones. We then evaluate the block error rates as the performance measure of the centralized implementation with an optimal minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) transceiver. Numerical results show that the proposed PCQNet achieves near-optimal performance compared with other quantized feedback schemes and significantly reduces the feedback overhead with negligible performance degradation.

Deep Learning-Based Joint CSI Feedback and Hybrid Precoding in FDD mmWave Massive MIMO Systems.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning approach to realize channel state information (CSI) feedback and hybrid precoding for millimeter wave massive multiple-input multiple-output systems in the frequency division duplexing mode. Different from conventional approaches that treat the CSI reconstruction and hybrid precoding as separate components, we propose a new end-to-end learning method bypassing the channel reconstruction phase, and design the hybrid precoders and combiners directly from the feedback codewords (a compressed version of the CSI). More specifically, we design a neural network composed of the CSI feedback and hybrid precoding. Experiment results show that our proposed network can achieve better performance than conventional hybrid precoding schemes that reserve channel reconstruction, especially when the feedback resources are limited.

Low-Resolution Precoding for Multi-Antenna Downlink Channels and OFDM.

Downlink precoding is considered for multi-path multi-input single-output channels where the base station uses orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing and low-resolution signaling. A quantized coordinate minimization (QCM) algorithm is proposed and its performance is compared to other precoding algorithms including squared infinity-norm relaxation (SQUID), multi-antenna greedy iterative quantization (MAGIQ), and maximum safety margin precoding. MAGIQ and QCM achieve the highest information rates and QCM has the lowest complexity measured in the number of multiplications. The information rates are computed for pilot-aided channel estimation and a blind detector that performs joint data and channel estimation. Bit error rates for a 5G low-density parity-check code confirm the information-theoretic calculations. Simulations with imperfect channel knowledge at the transmitter show that the performance of QCM and SQUID degrades in a similar fashion as zero-forcing precoding with high resolution quantizers.

Lights and Shadows: A Comprehensive Survey on Cooperative and Precoding Schemes to Overcome LOS Blockage and Interference in Indoor VLC.

Visible light communications (VLC) have received significant attention as a way of moving part of the saturated indoor wireless traffic to the wide and unregulated visible optical spectrum. Nowadays, VLC are considered as a suitable technology, for several applications such as high-rate data transmission, supporting internet of things communications or positioning. The signal processing originally derived from radio-frequency (RF) systems such as cooperative or precoding schemes can be applied to VLC. However, its implementation is not straightforward. Furthermore, unlike RF transmission, VLC present a predominant line-of-sight link, although a weak non-LoS component may appear due to the reflection of the light on walls, floor, ceiling and nearby objects. Blocking effects may compromise the performance of the aforementioned transmission schemes. There exist several surveys in the literature focused on VLC and its applications, but the management of the shadowing and interference in VLC requires a comprehensive study. To fill this gap, this work introduces the implementation of cooperative and precoding schemes to VLC, while remarking their benefits and drawbacks for overcoming the shadowing effects. After that, the combination of both cooperative and precoding schemes is analyzed as a way of providing resilient VLC networks. Finally, we propose several open issues that the cooperative and precoding schemes must face in order to provide satisfactory VLC performance in indoor scenarios.

Low Spatial Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Transmission for Improved Energy Efficiency in Massive MIMO Systems.

A significant portion of the operating power of a base station is consumed by power amplifiers (PAs). Much of this power is dissipated in the form of heat, as the overall efficiency of currently deployed PAs is typically very low. This is because the structure of conventional precoding techniques typically results in a relatively high variation in output power at different antennas in the array, and many PAs are operated well below saturation to avoid distortion of the transmitted signals. In this work, we use a realistic model for power consumption in PAs and study the impact of power variation across antennas in the array on the energy efficiency of a massive MIMO downlink system. We introduce a family of linear precoding matrices that allow us to control the spatial peak-to-average power ratio by projecting a fraction of the transmitted power onto the null space of the channel. These precoding matrices preserve the structure of conventional precoders; e.g., they suppress multiuser interference when used together with zeroforcing precoding and bring advantages over these precoders by operating PAs in a more power-efficient region and reducing the total radiated distortion. Our numerical results show that by controlling the power variations between antennas in the array and incorporating the nonlinearity properties of PA into the precoder optimization, significant gains in energy efficiency can be achieved over conventional precoding techniques.

Machine Learning-Inspired Hybrid Precoding for mmWave MU-MIMO Systems with Domestic Switch Network.

Hybrid precoding is an attractive technique in MU-MIMO systems with significantly reduced hardware costs. However, it still requires a complex analog network to connect the RF chains and antennas. In this paper, we develop a novel hybrid precoding structure for the downlink transmission with a compact RF structure. Specifically, the proposed structure relies on domestic connections instead of global connections to link RF chains and antennas. Fixed-degree phase shifters provide candidate signals, and simple on-off switches are used to route the signal to antennas, thus RF adders are no longer required. Baseband zero forcing and block diagonalization are used to cancel interference for single-antenna and multiple-antenna users, respectively. We formulate how to design the RF precoder by optimizing the probability distribution through cross-entropy minimization which originated in machine learning. To optimize the energy efficiency, we use the fractional programming technique and exploit the Dinkelbach method-based framework to optimize the number of active antennas. Simulation results show that proposed algorithms can yield significant advantages under different configurations.

Multi-User Scheduling for 6G V2X Ultra-Massive MIMO System.

6G vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication will be combined with vehicle automatic driving technology and play an important role in automatic driving. However, in 6G V2X systems, vehicle users have the characteristics of high-speed movement. Therefore, how to provide stable and reliable wireless link quality and improve channel gain has become a problem that must be solved. To solve this problem, a new multi-user scheduling algorithm based on block diagonalization (BD) precoding for 6G ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is proposed in this paper. The algorithm takes advantage of the sensitive nature of BD precoding to channel correlation, uses the Pearson coefficient after matrix vectorization to measure the channel correlation between users, defines the scheduling factor to measure the channel quality according to the user noise enhancement factor, and jointly considers the influence of the correlation between user channels and channel quality, ensuring the selection of high-quality channels while minimizing channel correlation. Simulation results show that compared with the multi-user scheduling algorithm based on subspace correlation, condition number, and geometric angle, the proposed algorithm can obtain higher user channel gain, effectively reduce the system bit error rate, and can be applied to 6G V2X communication.

Low Complexity Hybrid Precoding Designs for Multiuser mmWave/THz Ultra Massive MIMO Systems.

Millimeter-wave and terahertz technologies have been attracting attention from the wireless research community since they can offer large underutilized bandwidths which can enable the support of ultra-high-speed connections in future wireless communication systems. While the high signal attenuation occurring at these frequencies requires the adoption of very large (or the so-called ultra-massive) antenna arrays, in order to accomplish low complexity and low power consumption, hybrid analog/digital designs must be adopted. In this paper we present a hybrid design algorithm suitable for both mmWave and THz multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which comprises separate computation steps for the digital precoder, analog precoder and multiuser interference mitigation. The design can also incorporate different analog architectures such as phase shifters, switches and inverters, antenna selection and so on. Furthermore, it is also applicable for different structures, namely fully-connected structures, arrays of subarrays (AoSA) and dynamic arrays of subarrays (DAoSA), making it suitable for the support of ultra-massive MIMO (UM-MIMO) in severely hardware constrained THz systems. We will show that, by using the proposed approach, it is possible to achieve good trade-offs between spectral efficiency and simplified implementation, even as the number of users and data streams increases.

Efficient Transmit Antenna Subset Selection for Multiuser Space-Time Line Code Systems.

We consider the problem of the efficient transmit antenna subset (TAS) selection for maximizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of multiuser space-time line code (MU-STLC) systems. The exhaustive search for optimal TAS selection is impractical since the total number of transmit antennas increases. We propose two efficient TAS selection schemes based on the Woodbury formula. The first is to incrementally select NS active transmit antennas among the available NT transmit antennas. To reduce the complexity of the incremental selection scheme, the Woodbury formula is employed in the optimization process. The second is to perform the decremental strategy in which the Woodbury formula is also applied to develop the low-complexity TAS selection procedure for the MU-STLC systems. Simulation results show that the proposed incremental and decremental TAS selection algorithms offer better alternatives than the existing greedy TAS selection algorithm for the MU-STLC systems. Furthermore, in terms of bit error rate, the proposed minimum mean square error decremental TAS selection algorithm turns out to outperform the existing greedy algorithm with significantly lower computational complexity. Finally, we analyze the detection SINR penalty experienced from TAS selection and the analytical quantity is shown to be well matched with simulation results.

A Novel Hybrid Precoding-Companding Technique for Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction in 5G and beyond.

Several high-speed wireless systems use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) due to its advantages. 5G has adopted OFDM and is expected to be considered beyond 5G (B5G). Meanwhile, OFDM has a high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) problem. Hybridization between two PAPR reduction techniques gains the two techniques' advantages. Hybrid precoding-companding techniques are attractive as they require small computational complexity to achieve high PAPR reduction gain. Many precoding-companding techniques were introduced to increasing the PAPR reduction gain. However, reducing Bit Error Rate (BER) and out-of-band (OOB) radiation are more significant than increasing PAPR reduction gain. This paper proposes a new precoding-companding technique to better reduce the BER and OOB radiation than previous precoding-companding techniques. Results showed that the proposed technique outperforms all previous precoding-companding techniques in BER enhancement and OOB radiation reduction. The proposed technique reduces the Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) by 15 dB compared with 10 dB for the best previous technique. Additionally, the proposed technique increases high power amplifier efficiency (HPA) by 11.4%, while the best previous technique increased HPA efficiency by 9.8%. Moreover, our proposal achieves PAPR reduction gain better than the most known powerful PAPR reduction technique with a 99% reduction in required computational complexity.

User Oriented Transmit Antenna Selection in Massive Multi-User MIMO SDR Systems.

A transmit antenna selection (TxAS) aided multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system is proposed for operating in the MIMO downlink channel environments, which shows significant improvement in terms of higher data rate when compared to the conventional MU-MIMO systems operating without adopting TxAS, while maintaining low hardware costs. We opt for employing a simple yet efficient zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) linear precoding scheme at the transmitter in order to reduce the decoding complexity when considering users' side. Moreover, considering that users within the same cell may require various qualities of service (QoS), we further propose a novel user-oriented smart TxAS (UOSTxAS) scheme, of which the main idea is to carry out AS based on the QoS requirements of different users. At last, we implement the proposed UOSTxAS scheme in the software defined radio (SDR) MIMO communication hardware platform, which is the first prototype hardware system that runs the UOSTxAS MU-MIMO scheme. Our results show that, by employing TxAS, the proposed UOSTxAS scheme is capable of offering higher data rates for priority users, while reasonably ensuring the performance of the common users requiring lower rates both in simulation and in the implemented SDR MIMO communication platform.

Evolutionary Algorithm Based Capacity Maximization of 5G/B5G Hybrid Pre-Coding Systems.

Hybrid pre-coding strategies are considered as a potential solution for combating path loss experienced by Massive MIMO systems operating at millimeter wave frequencies. The partially connected structure is preferred over the fully connected structure due to smaller computational complexity. In order to improve the spectral efficiency of a partially connected hybrid pre-coding architecture, which is one of the requirements of future 5G/B5G systems, this work proposes the application of evolutionary algorithms for joint computation of RF and the digital pre-coder. The evolutionary algorithm based scheme jointly evaluates the RF and digital pre-coder for a partially connected hybrid structure by taking into account the current RF chain for computations and therefore it is not based on interference cancellation from all other RF chains as in the case of successive interference cancellation (SIC). The evolutionary algorithm, i.e., Artificial Bee Colony (BEE) based pre-coding scheme outperforms other popular evolutionary algorithms as well as the SIC based pre-coding scheme in terms of spectral efficiency. In addition, the proposed algorithm is not overly sensitive to variations in channel conditions.

Multi-User Precoder Designs for RGB Visible Light Communication Systems.

In this paper, we design linear precoders for the downlink of a visible light communication (VLC) system that simultaneously serves multiple users. Instead of using phosphor-coated white light-emitting diodes (PWLEDs), we focus on Red-Green-Blue light-emitting diodes (RGB-LEDs) that allow modulating three separate data streams on the three primary colors of the RGB-LEDs. For this system, we design a zero-forcing (ZF) precoder that maximizes the weighted sum rate for a multilevel pulse amplitude modulation (M-PAM). The precoding design in RGB-based systems presents some challenges due to the system constraints, such as the limited power, the non-negative amplitude constraints per light-emitting diode (LED), and the need to guarantee white light emission while transmitting with RGB-LEDs. For comparison purposes, we also consider the ZF design for a PWLED-based system and evaluate the performance of both a PWLED- and an RGB-based system.