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1-Bit Massive MIMO Transmission: Embracing Interference with Symbol-Level Precoding

Ang Li, Christos Masouros, A. Lee Swindlehurst, Wei Yu

TL;DR

The concept of constructive interference (CI) is explained and elaborate on how CI can benefit the 1-bit signal design by exploiting the traditionally undesired multi-user interference as well as the interference from imperfect hardware components.

Abstract

The deployment of large-scale antenna arrays for cellular base stations (BSs), termed as `Massive MIMO', has been a key enabler for meeting the ever-increasing capacity requirement for 5G communication systems and beyond. Despite their promising performance, fully-digital massive MIMO systems require a vast amount of hardware components including radio frequency chains, power amplifiers, digital-to-analog converters (DACs), etc., resulting in a huge increase in terms of the total power consumption and hardware costs for cellular BSs. Towards both spectrally-efficient and energy-efficient massive MIMO deployment, a number of hardware limited architectures have been proposed, including hybrid analog-digital structures, constant-envelope transmission, and use of low-resolution DACs. In this paper, we overview the recent interest in improving the error-rate performance of massive MIMO systems deployed with 1-bit DACs through precoding at the symbol level. This line of research goes beyond traditional interference suppression or cancellation techniques by managing interference on a symbol-by-symbol basis. This provides unique opportunities for interference-aware precoding tailored for practical massive MIMO systems. Firstly, we characterize constructive interference (CI) and elaborate on how CI can benefit the 1-bit signal design by exploiting the traditionally undesired multi-user interference as well as the interference from imperfect hardware components. Subsequently, we overview several solutions for 1-bit signal design to illustrate the gains achievable by exploiting CI. Finally, we identify some challenges and future research directions for 1-bit massive MIMO systems that are yet to be explored.

1-Bit Massive MIMO Transmission: Embracing Interference with Symbol-Level Precoding

TL;DR

The concept of constructive interference (CI) is explained and elaborate on how CI can benefit the 1-bit signal design by exploiting the traditionally undesired multi-user interference as well as the interference from imperfect hardware components.

Abstract

The deployment of large-scale antenna arrays for cellular base stations (BSs), termed as `Massive MIMO', has been a key enabler for meeting the ever-increasing capacity requirement for 5G communication systems and beyond. Despite their promising performance, fully-digital massive MIMO systems require a vast amount of hardware components including radio frequency chains, power amplifiers, digital-to-analog converters (DACs), etc., resulting in a huge increase in terms of the total power consumption and hardware costs for cellular BSs. Towards both spectrally-efficient and energy-efficient massive MIMO deployment, a number of hardware limited architectures have been proposed, including hybrid analog-digital structures, constant-envelope transmission, and use of low-resolution DACs. In this paper, we overview the recent interest in improving the error-rate performance of massive MIMO systems deployed with 1-bit DACs through precoding at the symbol level. This line of research goes beyond traditional interference suppression or cancellation techniques by managing interference on a symbol-by-symbol basis. This provides unique opportunities for interference-aware precoding tailored for practical massive MIMO systems. Firstly, we characterize constructive interference (CI) and elaborate on how CI can benefit the 1-bit signal design by exploiting the traditionally undesired multi-user interference as well as the interference from imperfect hardware components. Subsequently, we overview several solutions for 1-bit signal design to illustrate the gains achievable by exploiting CI. Finally, we identify some challenges and future research directions for 1-bit massive MIMO systems that are yet to be explored.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 16 sections, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Classical 1-Bit DAC Transmission: MSE-Based Approaches
  3. 1-Bit DAC Transmission: The Scope for Interference Exploitation
  4. CI Characterization
  5. The Concept of Interference Exploitation
  6. Signal Design
  7. CI-Based 1-Bit Precoding Solutions
  8. Linear Programming Based Solution
  9. Symbol Scaling Based Solution
  10. P-BB Based Near-Optimal Solution
  11. Open Challenges and Future Works
  12. CI Precoding for Different DAC Architectures
  13. Task-Based Quantization
  14. Effect of Nonlinear Power Amplifiers
  15. Machine Learning Based 1-Bit CI Transmitter
  16. ...and 1 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure : Figure 1. A generic framework for 1-bit massive MIMO communication systems based on constructive interference.
  • Figure : Figure 2. An illustration of the advantage of the CI metric compared with MSE.
  • Figure : Figure 3. Numerical comparison of CI-based and MSE-based 1-bit precoding in the literature, standard uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel, max iteration number for '1-Bit SQUID', '1-Bit C1PO' and '1-Bit C2PO' is 50, 20 and 20, respectively ci-dac-1, ci-dac-2.