Downlink Performance of Uplink Fractional Power Control in 5G Massive MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This study evaluates how fractional power control affects downlink performance in 5G massive MIMO systems, highlighting significant throughput gains and the importance of FPC in mitigating pilot contamination.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive simulation-based analysis of FPC's impact on downlink performance in 5G massive MIMO, considering realistic deployment parameters.

Findings

Optimized FPC significantly improves cell border throughput.

FPC effectiveness increases with pilot contamination severity.

Simulation results guide FPC parameter tuning for 5G deployments.

Abstract

Uplink power control is an efficient scheme to mitigate pilot contamination in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study on the effects of fractional power control (FPC) on the downlink performance of the most relevant fifth generation (5G) massive MIMO deployments. Specifically, we perform thorough system simulations based on the most recent three dimensional spatial channel model released by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project to evaluate the impact of different deployment-related parameters such as pilot reuse factor, beamforming criterion, and base station array size. Our results indicate the most suitable tuning of the FPC parameters and show that optimized FPC provides huge gains in the cell border throughput when compared to a baseline scheme with all the users transmitting at maximum power. Moreover, our simulations also demonstrate that the effectiveness of FPC grows in scenarios with severe pilot contamination, confirming that implementing this feature is essential in realistic deployments.