Uplink Performance of Time-Reversal MRC in Massive MIMO Systems subject to Phase Noise

Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) cellular systems with an excess of base station (BS) antennas (Massive MIMO) offer unprecedented multiplexing gains and radiated energy efficiency. Oscillator phase noise is introduced in the transmitter and receiver radio frequency chains and severely degrades the performance of communication systems. We study the effect of oscillator phase noise in frequency-selective Massive MIMO systems with imperfect channel state information (CSI) and M BS antennas. In particular, we consider two distinct operation modes, namely when the phase noise processes at the BS antennas are identical (synchronous operation) and when they are independent (non-synchronous operation). We analyze a linear and low-complexity time-reversal maximum-ratio combining (TR-MRC) reception strategy. For both operation modes we derive a lower bound on the sum-capacity and we compare the performance of the two modes. Based on the derived achievable sum-rate, we show that with the proposed receive processing an O(<img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Csqrt%7BM%7D" />) array gain is achievable. Due to the phase noise drift the estimated effective channel becomes progressively outdated. Therefore, phase noise effectively limits the length of the interval used for data transmission and the number of scheduled users. The derived achievable rates provide insights into the optimum choice of the data interval length and the number of scheduled users.
Manuscript received March 5, 2014; revised July 10, 2014; accepted September 6, 2014. Date of publication September 18, 2014; date of current version February 6, 2015. This work was supported in part by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and in part by ELLIIT. The work of S. K. Mohammed was supported by the Science and Engineering Research Board, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. This paper was presented in part at the 50th Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, October 2012. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was L. Sanguinetti.