Multi-User Delay Alignment Modulation for Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO

TL;DR

This paper extends delay alignment modulation (DAM) to multi-user millimeter wave massive MIMO systems, showing it can effectively eliminate ISI and IUI with simple delay pre-compensation and beamforming, outperforming traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces a multi-user DAM framework for mmWave massive MIMO, analyzing its asymptotic performance and comparing different beamforming strategies.

Findings

DAM can eliminate ISI and IUI when BS antennas are large.

Multi-user DAM outperforms single-path-based ISI mitigation.

Different beamforming strategies impact DAM performance.

Abstract

Delay alignment modulation (DAM) is a novel wideband communication technique, which exploits the high spatial resolution and multi-path sparsity of millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to mitigate inter-symbol interference (ISI), without relying on conventional techniques like channel equalization or multi-carrier transmission. In this paper, we extend the DAM technique to multi-user mmWave massive MIMO communication systems. We first provide asymptotic analysis by showing that when the number of base station (BS) antennas is much larger than the total number of channel paths, DAM is able to eliminate both ISI and inter-user interference (IUI) with the simple delay pre-compensation and per-path-based maximal ratio transmission (MRT) beamforming. We then study the general multi-user DAM design by considering the three classical transmit beamforming strategies in a per-path basis, namely MRT, zero-forcing (ZF) and regularized zero-forcing (RZF). Simulation results demonstrate that multi-user DAM can significantly outperform the benchmarking single-carrier ISI mitigation technique that only uses the strongest channel path of each user.