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The prospects of using a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) to aid wireless communication systems have recently received much attention from academia and industry. Most papers make theoretical studies based on elementary models, while the prototyping of RIS-aided wireless communication and real-world field trials are scarce. In this paper, we describe a new RIS prototype consisting of 1100 controllable elements working at 5.8 GHz band. We propose an efficient algorithm for configuring the RIS over the air by exploiting the geometrical array properties and a practical receiver-RIS feedback link. In our indoor test, where the transmitter and receiver are separated by a 30 cm thick concrete wall, our RIS prototype provides a 26 dB power gain compared to the baseline case where the RIS is replaced by a copper plate. A 27 dB power gain was observed in the short-distance outdoor measurement. We also carried out long-distance measurements and successfully transmitted a 32 Mbps data stream over 500 m. A 1080p video was live-streamed and it only played smoothly when the RIS was utilized. The power consumption of the RIS is around 1 W. Our paper is vivid proof that the RIS is a very promising technology for future wireless communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the impact of channel aging on the performance of cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with both spatial correlation and pilot contamination. We derive novel closed-form uplink and downlink spectral efficiency (SE) expressions that take imperfect channel estimation into account. More specifically, we consider large-scale fading decoding and matched-filter receiver cooperation in the uplink. The uplink performance of a small-cell (SC) system is derived for comparison. The CF massive MIMO system achieves higher 95%-likely uplink SE than the SC system. In the downlink, the coherent transmission has four times higher 95%-likely per-user SE than the non-coherent transmission. Statistical channel cooperation power control (SCCPC) is used to mitigate the inter-user interference. SCCPC performs better than full power transmission, but the benefits are gradually weakened as the channel aging becomes stronger. Furthermore, strong spatial correlation reduces the SE but degrades the effect of channel aging. Increasing the number of antennas can improve the SE while decreasing the energy efficiency. Finally, we use the maximum normalized Doppler shift to design the SE-improved length of the resource block. Simulation results are presented to validate the accuracy of our expressions and prove that the CF massive MIMO system is more robust to channel aging than the SC system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of a single-cell massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system with distributed jammers. We define four different attack scenarios and compare their impact on the massive MIMO system as well as on a conventional single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) system. More specifically, the jammers attack the base station (BS) during both the uplink training phase and data phase. The BS uses either least squares (LS) or linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimators for channel estimation and utilizes either maximum-ratio-combining (MRC) or zero-forcing (ZF) decoding vectors. We show that ZF gives higher SE than MRC but, interestingly, the performance is unaffected by the choice of the estimators. The simulation results show that the performance loss percentage of massive MIMO is less than that of the SIMO system. Moreover, we consider two types of power control algorithms: jamming-aware and jamming-ignorant. In both cases, we consider the max-min and proportional fairness criteria to increase the uplink SE of massive MIMO systems. We notice numerically that max-min fairness is not a good option because if one user is strongly affected by the jamming, it will degrade the other users’ SE as well. On the other hand, proportional fairness improves the sum SE of the system compared with the full power transmission scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific world is becoming more open to the public and fellow researchers. Open access publishing is becoming accepted, even if some publishers are resisting. The next step is the open code and data paradigm, which was briefly discussed in the "From the Editor" column in the November 2018 issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) [1]. In this column, I follow up on this topic by sharing my experiences, best practices, and thoughts about reproducible research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how the distortion created by hardware impairments in a multiple-antenna base station affects the uplink spectral efficiency (SE), with a focus on massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO). This distortion is correlated across the antennas but has been often approximated as uncorrelated to facilitate (tractable) SE analysis. To determine when this approximation is accurate, basic properties of distortion correlation are first uncovered. Then, we separately analyze the distortion correlation caused by third-order non-linearities and by quantization. Finally, we study the SE numerically and show that the distortion correlation can be safely neglected in massive MIMO when there are sufficiently many users. Under independent identically distributed Rayleigh fading and equal signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), this occurs for more than five transmitting users. Other channel models and SNR variations have only minor impact on the accuracy. We also demonstrate the importance of taking the distortion characteristics into account in the receive combining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Transceiver hardware impairments (e.g., phase noise, in-phase/quadrature-phase imbalance, amplifier nonlinearities, and quantization errors) have obvious degradation effects on the performance of wireless communications. While prior works have improved our knowledge of the influence of hardware impairments of single-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems over Rayleigh fading channels, an analysis encompassing the Rician fading channel is not yet available. In this paper, we pursue a detailed analysis of regular and large-scale (LS) MIMO systems over Rician fading channels by deriving new closed-form expressions for the achievable rate to provide several important insights for practical system design. More specifically, for regular MIMO systems with hardware impairments, there is always a finite achievable rate ceiling, which is irrespective of the transmit power and fading conditions. For LS-MIMO systems, it is interesting to find that the achievable rate loss depends on the Rician $K$- factor, which reveals that the favorable propagation in LS-MIMO systems can remove the influence of hardware impairments. However, we show that the nonideal LS-MIMO system can still achieve high spectral efficiency due to its huge degrees of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The throughput of multicell systems is inherently limited by interference and the available communication resources. Coordinated resource allocation is the key to efficient performance, but the demand on backhaul signaling and computational resources grows rapidly with number of cells, terminals, and subcarriers. To handle this, we propose a novel multicell framework with dynamic cooperation clusters where each terminal is jointly served by a small set of base stations. Each base station coordinates interference to neighboring terminals only, thus limiting backhaul signalling and making the framework scalable. This framework can describe anything from interference channels to ideal joint multicell transmission. The resource allocation (i.e., precoding and scheduling) is formulated as an optimization problem (P1) with performance described by arbitrary monotonic functions of the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratios (SINRs) and arbitrary linear power constraints. Although (P1) is nonconvex and difficult to solve optimally, we are able to prove: 1) optimality of single-stream beamforming; 2) conditions for full power usage; and 3) a precoding parametrization based on a few parameters between zero and one. These optimality properties are used to propose low-complexity strategies: both a centralized scheme and a distributed version that only requires local channel knowledge and processing. We evaluate the performance on measured multicell channels and observe that the proposed strategies achieve close-to-optimal performance among centralized and distributed solutions, respectively. In addition, we show that multicell interference coordination can give substantial improvements in sum performance, but that joint transmission is very sensitive to synchronization errors and that some terminals can experience performance degradations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

\boldmath The impact of transmission design and spatial correlation on the symbol error rate (SER) is analyzed for multi-antenna communication links. The receiver has perfect channel state information (CSI), while the transmitter has either statistical or no CSI. The transmission is based on orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) and linear precoding. The precoding strategy that minimizes the worst-case SER is derived for the case when the transmitter has no CSI. Based on this strategy, the intuitive result that spatial correlation degrades the SER performance is proved mathematically. In the case when the transmitter knows the channel statistics, the correlation matrix is assumed to be jointly-correlated (a generalization of the Kronecker model). The eigenvectors of the SER-optimal precoding matrix are shown to originate from the correlation matrix and the remaining power allocation is a convex problem. Equal power allocation is SER-optimal at high SNR. Beamforming is SER-optimal at low SNR, or for increasing constellation sizes, and its optimality range is characterized. A heuristic low-complexity power allocation is proposed and evaluated numerically. Finally, it is proved analytically that receive-side correlation always degrades the SER. Transmit-side correlation will however improve the SER at low to medium SNR, while its impact is negligible at high SNR. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]