On the Performance of Zero-Forcing Processing in Multi-Way Massive MIMO Relay Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the spectral efficiency of zero-forcing processing in multi-way massive MIMO relay networks, demonstrating high performance with many antennas and active users under TDD protocol with channel estimation.

Contribution

It provides a tight analytical approximation of spectral efficiency for zero-forcing in multi-way massive MIMO relay networks, enabling performance comparison with maximum-ratio processing.

Findings

Zero-forcing achieves high spectral efficiency with many antennas.

Large antenna arrays enable serving many users simultaneously.

Zero-forcing outperforms maximum-ratio processing in spectral efficiency.

Abstract

We consider a multi-way massive multiple-input multiple-output relay network with zero-forcing processing at the relay. By taking into account the time-division duplex protocol with channel estimation, we derive an analytical approximation of the spectral efficiency. This approximation is very tight and simple which enables us to analyze the system performance, as well as, to compare the spectral efficiency with zero-forcing and maximum-ratio processing. Our results show that by using a very large number of relay antennas and with the zero-forcing technique, we can simultaneously serve many active users in the same time-frequency resource, each with high spectral efficiency.