Constructing Receiver Signal Points using Constrained Massive MIMO Arrays

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid RF array system combining constrained and full RF frontends to construct receiver signal points efficiently, achieving near-optimal performance in multi-user MIMO scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid RF system architecture and an algorithm that compensates for constrained RF frontends, enabling low-cost, high-performance receiver signal construction.

Findings

Performance close to exhaustive search in Rayleigh fading channels

Effective compensation for constrained RF frontends

Applicable to urban macro channel models

Abstract

A low cost solution for constructing receiver signal points is investigated that combines a large number of constrained radio frequency (RF) frontends with a limited number of full RF chains. The constrained RF front ends have low cost and are limited to on/off switching of antenna elements and a small number of phases. Severe degradations are typically observed for multi-user MIMO for these simple on/off antenna arrays. A few full RF frontends are shown to compensate for the signal errors of the high number of constrained RF frontends for various scenarios. An algorithm for such a hybrid RF (HRF) system is developed that achieves performance close to that of exhaustive search with respect to the mean square error of the constructed receiver signals for Rayleigh fading and the WINNER 2 Urban Macro channel model.

Full text

See pages 1-last of MoApaper_wz_v2_gk.pdf