Downlink Performance of Massive MIMO under General Channel Aging Conditions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the downlink performance of massive MIMO systems considering realistic channel aging factors like user mobility and phase noise, revealing that mobility effects dominate but do not alter fundamental power scaling laws.

Contribution

It introduces a joint channel-phase noise model and analyzes its impact on massive MIMO downlink performance using deterministic equivalents.

Findings

Mobility effects dominate phase noise in degradation.

Power scaling law $1/\sqrt{M}$ remains valid despite joint impairments.

Joint effects do not alter fundamental spectral efficiency scaling laws.

Abstract

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology aiming at achieving high spectral efficiency by deploying a large number of base station (BS) antennas using coherent combining. Channel aging due to user mobility is a significant degrading factor of such systems. In addition, cost efficiency of massive MIMO is a prerecuisite for their deployment, that leads to low cost antenna elements inducing high phase noise. Since phase is time-dependent, it contributes to channel aging. For this reason, we present a novel joint channel-phase noise model, that enables us to study the downlink of massive MIMO with maximum ratio transmission (MRT) precoder under these conditions by means of the deterministic equivalent of the achievable sum-rate. Among the noteworthy outcomes is that the degradation due to user mobility dominates over the effect of phase noise. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the joint effects of phase noise and user mobility do not degrade the power scaling law $1/\sqrt{M}$ ($M$ is the number of BS antennas), as has been established in massive MIMO systems with imperfect channel state information.