Aspects of Power Allocation in Massive MIMO

Abstract: The past decades have seen a rapid growth of mobile data trac, both in terms of connected devices and data rate. To satisfy the ever growing data trac demand in wireless communication systems, the current cellular systems have to be redesigned to increase both spectral eciency and energy eciency. Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output) is one solution that satisfy both requirements. In massive MIMO systems, hundreds of antennas are employed at the base station to provide service to many users at the same time and frequency. This enables the system to serve the users with uniformly good quality of service simultaneously, with low-cost hardware and without using extra bandwidth and energy. To achieve this, proper resource allocation is needed. Among the available resources, transmit power is one of the most important degree of freedom to control the spectral eciency and energy eciency. Due to the use of excessive number of antennas and low-end hardware at the base station, new aspects of power allocation compared to current systems arises. In the rst part of the thesis, a new uplink power allocation schemes that based on long term channel statistics is proposed. Since quality of the channel estimates is crucial in massive MIMO, in addition to data power allocation, joint power allocation that includes the pilot power as additional variable should be considered. Therefore a new framework for power allocation that matches practical systems is developed, as the methods developed in the literature cannot be applied directly to massive MIMO systems. Simulation results conrm the advantages brought by the the proposed new framework. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the eects of using low-end ampliers at the base stations. The non-linear behavior of power consumption in these ampliers changes the power consumption model at the base station, thereby changes the power allocation. Two dierent scenarios are investigated and both results show that a certain number of antennas can be turned o in low load scenarios.