Uplink Performance of Conventional and Massive MIMO Cellular Systems with Delayed CSIT

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the uplink performance of conventional and massive MIMO cellular systems considering delayed CSI and user mobility, deriving closed-form expressions and asymptotic limits to understand the impact of Doppler shifts and pilot contamination.

Contribution

It provides the first analytical closed-form expressions for sum-rate with finite antennas and asymptotic limits considering both pilot contamination and delayed CSI effects.

Findings

Massive MIMO remains advantageous under time-varying channels.

Doppler shifts significantly impact low SNR performance.

Analytical expressions quantify the effects of user mobility on sum-rate.

Abstract

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks, where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with large number of antennas and serve a number of users simultaneously, are very promising, but suffer from pilot contamination. Despite its importance, delayed channel state information (CSI) due to user mobility, being another degrading factor, lacks investigation in the literature. Hence, we consider an uplink model, where each BS applies zero-forcing decoder, accounting for both effects, but with the focal point on the relative users' movement with regard to the BS antennas. In this setting, analytical closed-form expressions for the sum-rate with finite number of BS antennas, and the asymptotic limits with infinite number of BS antennas epitomize the main contributions. In particular, the probability density function of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and the ergodic sum-rate are derived for any finite number of antennas. Insights of the impact of the arising Doppler shift due to user mobility into the low signal-to-noise ratio regime as well as the outage probability are obtained. Moreover, asymptotic analysis performance results in terms of infinitely increasing number of antennas, power, and both numbers of antennas and users (while their ratio is fixed) are provided. The numerical results demonstrate the performance loss in various Doppler shifts. An interesting observation is that massive MIMO is favorable even in time-varying channel conditions.