Multi-Cell Massive MIMO: Power Control and Channel Estimation

Abstract: Cellular network operators have witnessed significant growth in data traffic in the past few decades. This growth occurs due to the increase in the number of connected mobile devices, and further, the emerging mobile applications developed for rendering video-based on-demand services. As the available frequency bandwidth for cellular communication is limited, significant efforts are dedicated to improving the utilization of available spectrum and increasing the system performance with the aid of new technologies.  Third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) mobile communication networks were designed to facilitate high data traffic in cellular networks in past decades. Nevertheless, there is still a requirement for new cellular network technologies to accommodate the ever-growing data traffic demand. The fifth-generation (5G) is the latest generation of mobile communication systems deployed and implemented around the world. Its objective is to meet the tremendous ongoing increase in the data traffic requirements in cellular networks.  Massive MIMO (multiple-input-multi-output) is one of the backbone technologies in 5G networks. Massive MIMO originated from the concept of multi-user MIMO. It consists of base stations (BSs) implemented with a large number of antennas to increase the signal strengths via adaptive beamforming and concurrently serving many users on the same time-frequency blocks. With Massive MIMO technology, there is a notable enhancement of both sum spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) in comparison with conventional MIMO-based cellular networks. Resource allocation is an imperative factor to exploit the specified gains of Massive MIMO. It corresponds to efficiently allocating resources in the time, frequency, space, and power domains for cellular communication. Power control is one of the resource allocation methods of Massive MIMO networks to deliver high spectral and energy efficiency. Power control refers to a scheme that allocates transmit powers to the data transmitters such that the system maximizes some desirable performance metric. The first part of this thesis investigates reusing a Massive MIMO network's resources for direct communication of some specific user pairs known as device-to-device (D2D) underlay communication. D2D underlay can conceivably increase the SE of traditional Massive MIMO networks by enabling more simultaneous transmissions on the same frequencies. Nevertheless, it adds additional mutual interference to the network. Consequently, power control is even more essential in this scenario than the conventional Massive MIMO networks to limit the interference caused by the cellular network and the D2D communication to enable their coexistence. We propose a novel pilot transmission scheme for D2D users to limit the interference on the channel estimation phase of cellular users compared with sharing pilot sequences for cellular and D2D users. We also introduce a novel pilot and data power control scheme for D2D underlaid Massive MIMO networks. This method aims to assure that the D2D communication enhances the SE of the network compared to conventional Massive MIMO networks. In the second part of this thesis, we propose a novel power control approach for multi-cell Massive MIMO networks. The proposed power control approach solves the scalability issue of two well-known power control schemes frequently used in the Massive MIMO literature, based on the network-wide max-min and proportional fairness performance metrics. We first identify the scalability issue of these existing approaches. Additionally, we provide mathematical proof for the scalability of our proposed method. Our scheme aims at maximizing the geometric mean of the per-cell max-min SE. To solve the optimization problem, we prove that it can be rewritten in a convex form and is solved using standard optimization solvers.  The final part of this thesis focuses on downlink channel estimation in a Massive MIMO network. In Massive MIMO networks, to fully benefit from large antennas at the BSs and perform resource allocation, the BS must have access to high-quality channel estimates that can be acquired via the uplink pilot transmission phase. Time-division duplex (TDD) based Massive MIMO relies on channel reciprocity for the downlink transmission. Thanks to the channel hardening in the Massive MIMO networks with ideal propagation conditions, users rely on the statistical knowledge of channels for decoding the data in the downlink. However, when the channel hardening level is low, using only the channel statistics causes fluctuations in the performance. We investigate how to improve the performance by empowering the user to estimate the downlink channel from downlink data transmissions utilizing a model-based and a data-driven approach instead of relying only on channel statistics. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is compared with solely relying on statistical knowledge.