Category Archives: Technical insights

5G, Beyond 5G, Technical insights

Does Reciprocity-based Beamforming Break Down at Low SNR?

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I hear this being claimed now and then, and it is – of course – both correct and incorrect, at the same time. For the benefit of our readers I take the opportunity to provide some free consulting on the topic.

The important fact is that ergodic capacity can be lower-bounded by a formula of the form log2(1+SINR), where SINR is an “effective SINR” (that includes, among others, the effects of the terminal’s lack of channel knowledge).

This effective SINR scales proportionally to M (number of antennas), for fixed total radiated power.  Compared to a single-antenna system, reciprocity always offers M times better “beamforming gain” regardless of the system’s operating point.  (In fact one of the paradoxes of Massive MIMO is that performance always increases with M, despite the fact that there are “more unknowns to estimate”!) And yes, at very low SNR, the effective SINR is proportional to SNR^2 so reciprocity-based beamforming does “break down”, however, it is still M times better than a single-antenna link (with the same total radiated power). One will also, eventually, reach a point where the capacity bound for omnidirectional transmission (e.g. using a space-time code with appropriate dimension reduction in order to host the required downlink pilots) exceeds that of reciprocity-based beamforming, however, importantly, in this regime the bounds may be loose.

These matters, along with numerous case studies involving actual link budget calculations, are of course rigorously explained in our recent textbook.

5G, Commentary, Technical insights

What is the Purpose of Asymptotic Analysis?

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Since its inception, Massive MIMO has been strongly connected with asymptotic analysis. Marzetta’s seminal paper featured an unlimited number of base station antennas. Many of the succeeding papers considered a finite number of antennas, M, and then analyzed the performance in the limit where M\to\infty. Massive MIMO is so tightly connected with asymptotic analysis that reviewers question whether a paper is actually about Massive MIMO if it does not contain an asymptotic part – this has happened to me repeatedly.

Have you reflected over what the purpose of asymptotic analysis is? The goal is not that we should design and deploy wireless networks with a nearly infinite number of antennas. Firstly, it is physically impossible to do that in a finite-sized world, irrespective of whether you let the array aperture grow or pack the antennas more densely. Secondly, the conventional channel models break down, since you will eventually receive more power than you transmitted. Thirdly, the technology will neither be cost nor energy efficient, since the cost/energy grows linearly with M, while the delivered system performance either approaches a finite limit or grows logarithmically with M.

It is important not to overemphasize the implications of asymptotic results. Consider the popular power-scaling law which says that one can use the array gain of Massive MIMO to reduce the transmit power as 1/\sqrt{M} and still approach a non-zero asymptotic rate limit. This type of scaling law has been derived for many different scenarios in different papers. The practical implication is that you can reduce the transmit power as you add more antennas, but the asymptotic scaling law does not prescribe how much you should reduce the power when going from, say, 40 to 400 antennas. It all depends on which rates you want to deliver to your users.

The figure below shows the transmit power in a scenario where we start with 1 W for a single-antenna transmitter and then follow the asymptotic power-scaling law as the number of antennas increases. With M=100 antennas, the transmit power per antenna is just 1 mW, which is unnecessarily low given the fact that the circuits in the corresponding transceiver chain will consume much more power. By using higher transmit power than 1 mW per antenna, we can deliver higher rates to the users, while barely effecting the total power of the base station.

Reducing the transmit power per antenna to 1 mW, or smaller, makes little practical sense, since the transceiver chain will consume much more power irrespective of the transmit power.

Similarly, there is a hardware-scaling law which says that one can increase the error vector magnitude (EVM) proportionally to M^{1/4} and approach a non-zero asymptotic rate limit. The practical implication is that Massive MIMO systems can use simpler hardware components (that cause more distortion) than conventional systems, since there is a lower sensitivity to distortion. This is the foundation on which the recent works on low-bit ADC resolutions builds (see this paper and references therein).

Even the importance of the coherent interference, caused by pilot contamination, is easily overemphasized if one only considers the asymptotic behavior.  For example, the finite rate limit that appears when communicating over i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels with maximum ratio or zero-forcing processing is only approached in practice if one has around one million antennas.

In my opinion, the purpose of asymptotic analysis is not to understand the asymptotic behaviors themselves, but what the asymptotics can tell us about the performance at practical number of antennas. Here are some usages that I think are particularly sound:

  • Determine what is the asymptotically optimal transmission scheme and then evaluate how it performs in a practical system.
  • Derive large-scale approximations of the rates that are reasonable tight also at practical number of antennas. One can use these approximations to determine which factors that have a dominant impact on the rate or to get a tractable way to optimize system performance (e.g., by transmit power allocation).
  • Determine how far from the asymptotically achievable performance a practical system is.
  • Determine if we can deliver any given user rates by simply deploying enough antennas, or if the system is fundamentally interference limited.
  • Simplify the signal processing by utilizing properties such as channel hardening and favorable propagation. These phenomena can be observed already at 100 antennas, although you will never get a fully deterministic channel or zero inter-user interference in practice.

Some form of Massive MIMO will appear in 5G, but to get a well-designed system we need to focus more on demonstrating and optimizing the performance in practical scenarios (e.g., the key 5G use cases) and less on pure asymptotic analysis.

Commentary, Technical insights

What is Spatial Channel Correlation?

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The channel between a single-antenna user and an M-antenna base station can be represented by an M-dimensional channel vector. The canonical channel model in the Massive MIMO literature is independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading, in which the vector is a circularly symmetric complex Gaussian random variable with a scaled identity matrix as correlation/covariance matrix: \mathbf{h} \sim CN(\mathbf{0},\beta \mathbf{I}_M), where \beta is the variance.

With i.i.d. Rayleigh fading, the channel gain \|\mathbf{h}\|^2 has an Erlang(M,1/\beta)-distribution (this is a scaled \chi^2 distribution) and the channel direction \mathbf{h} / \|\mathbf{h}\| is uniformly distributed over the unit sphere in \mathbb{C}^M. The channel gain and the channel direction are also independent random variables, which is why this is a spatially uncorrelated channel model.

One of the key benefits of i.i.d. Rayleigh fading is that one can compute closed-form rate expressions, at least when using maximum ratio or zero-forcing processing; see Fundamentals of Massive MIMO for details. These expressions have an intuitive interpretation, but should be treated with care because practical channels are not spatially uncorrelated. Firstly, due to the propagation environment, the channel vector is more probable to point in some directions than in others. Secondly, the antennas have spatially dependent antenna patterns. Both factors contribute to the fact that spatial channel correlation always appears in practice.

One of the basic properties of spatial channel correlation is that the base station array receives different average signal power from different spatial directions. This is illustrated in Figure 1 below for a uniform linear array with 100 antennas, where the angle of arrival is measured from the boresight of the array.

Figure 1: The average signal power received at a Massive MIMO base station from different angular directions, as seen from the array. Spatially correlated fading implies that this average power is angle-dependent, while i.i.d. fading gives the same power in all directions.

 

As seen from Figure 1, with i.i.d. Rayleigh fading the average received power is equally large from all directions, while with spatially correlated fading it varies depending on in which direction the base station applies its receive beamforming. Note that this is a numerical example that was generated by letting the signal come from four scattering clusters located in different angular directions. Channel measurements from Lund University (see Figure 4 in this paper) show how the spatial correlation behaves in practical scenarios.

Correlated Rayleigh fading is a tractable way to model a spatially  correlation channel vector: \mathbf{h} \sim CN(\mathbf{0}, \mathbf{B}), where the covariance matrix \mathbf{B} is also the correlation matrix. It is only when \mathbf{B} is a scaled identity matrix that we have spatially uncorrelated fading. The eigenvalue distribution determines how strongly spatially correlated the channel is. If all eigenvalues are identical, then \mathbf{B} is a scaled identity matrix and there is no spatial correlation. If there are a few strong eigenvalues that contain most of the power, then there is very strong spatial correlation and the channel vector is very likely to be (approximately) spanned by the corresponding eigenvectors. This is illustrated in Figure 2 below, for the same scenario as in the previous figure. In the considered correlated fading case, there are 20 eigenvalues that are larger than in the i.i.d. fading case. These eigenvalues contain 94% of the power, while the next 20 eigenvalues contain 5% and the smallest 60 eigenvalues only contain 1%. Hence, most of the power is concentrated to a subspace of dimension \leq40. The fraction of strong eigenvalues is related to the fraction of the angular interval from which strong signals are received. This relation can be made explicit in special cases.

Figure 2: Spatial channel correlation results in eigenvalue variations, while all eigenvalues are the same under i.i.d fading. The larger the variations, the stronger the correlation is.

 

One example of spatially correlated fading is when the correlation matrix has equal diagonal elements and non-zero off-diagonal elements, which describe the correlation between the channel coefficients of different antennas. This is a reasonable model when deploying a compact base station array in tower. Another example is a diagonal correlation matrix with different diagonal elements. This is a reasonable model when deploying distributed antennas, as in the case of cell-free Massive MIMO.

Finally, a more general channel model is correlated Rician fading: \mathbf{h} \sim CN(\mathbf{b}, \mathbf{B}), where the mean value \mathbf{b} represents the deterministic line-of-sight channel and the covariance matrix \mathbf{B} determines the properties of the fading. The correlation matrix \mathbf{B}+\mathbf{b}\mathbf{b}^H can still be used to determine the spatial correlation of the received signal power. However, from a system performance perspective, the fraction k=\| \mathbf{b} \|^2/\mathrm{tr}(\mathbf{B}) between the power of the line-of-sight path and the scattered paths can have a large impact on the performance as well. A nearly deterministic channel with a large  k-factor provide more reliable communication, in particular since under correlated fading it is only the large eigenvalues of \mathbf{B} that contributes to the channel hardening (which otherwise provides reliability in Massive MIMO).

Commentary, Technical insights

Reflections on “Massive MIMO: How Many Antennas Do We Need?”

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Sometime last week, the paper “Massive MIMO in the UL/DL of Cellular Networks: How Many Antennas Do We Need?”  that I have co-authored  reached 1000 citations (according to Google Scholar). I feel that this is a good moment to share some reflections on this work and discuss some conclusions we too hastily drew. The paper is an extension of a conference paper that appeared at the 2011 Allerton Conference. At that time, we could by no means anticipate the impact Massive MIMO would have and many people were quite doubtful about the technology (including myself). I still remember very well a heated discussion with an esteemed Bell Lab’s colleague trying to convince me that there were never ever going to be more than two active RF inputs into a base station!

Looking back, I am always wondering where the term “Massive MIMO” actually comes from. When we wrote our paper, the terms “large-scale antenna systems (LSAS)” or simply “large-scale MIMO” were commonly used to refer to base stations with very large antenna arrays, and I do not recall what made us choose our title.

The Google Trends Chart for “Massive MIMO” above clearly shows that interest in this topic started roughly at the time Tom Marzetta’s seminal paper was published, although the term itself does not appear in it at all. If anyone has an idea or reference where the term “Massive MIMO” was first used, please feel free to write this in the comment field.

In case you have not read our paper, let me first explain the key question it tries to answer. Marzetta showed in his paper that the simplest form of linear receive combining and transmit precoding, namely maximum ratio combining (MRC) and transmission (MRT), respectively, achieve an asymptotic spectral efficiency (when the number of antennas goes to infinity) that is only limited by coherent interference caused by user equipments (UEs) using the same pilot sequences for channel training (see the previous blog post on pilot contamination). All non-coherent interference such as noise, channel gain uncertainty due to estimation errors, and interference magically vanishes thanks to the strong law of large numbers and favorable propagation. Intrigued by this beautiful result, we wanted to know what happens for a large but finite number of antennas M. Clearly, MRC/MRT are not optimal in this regime, and we wanted to quantify how much can be gained by using more advanced combining/precoding schemes. In other words, our goal was to figure out how many antennas could be “saved” by computing a matrix inverse, which is the key ingredient of the more sophisticated schemes, such as MMSE combining or regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoding. Moreover, we wanted to compute how much of the asymptotic spectral efficiency can be achieved with M antennas. Please read our paper if you are interested in our findings.

What is interesting to notice is that we (and many other researchers) had always taken the following facts about Massive MIMO for granted and repeated them in numerous papers without further questioning:

  • Due to pilot contamination, Massive MIMO has a finite asymptotic capacity
  • MRC/MRT are asymptotically optimal
  • More sophisticated receive combining and transmit precoding schemes can only improve the performance for finite M

We have recently uploaded a new paper on Arxiv which proves that all of these “facts” are incorrect and essentially artifacts from using simplistic channel models and suboptimal precoding/combining schemes. What I find particularly amusing is that we have come to this result by carefully analyzing the asymptotic performance of the multicell MMSE receive combiner that I mentioned but rejected in the 2011 Allerton paper. To understand the difference between the widely used single-cell MMSE (S-MMSE) combining and the (not widely used) multicell MMSE (M-MMSE) combining, let us look at their respective definitions for a base station located in cell j:

\mathbf{V}^{\textrm{M-MMSE}}_j = \left( \sum_{l=1}^{L} \hat{\mathbf{H}}_l \hat{\mathbf{H}}_l^H + \sum_{l=1}^L \sum_{i=1}^K \mathbf{C}_{li} + \sigma^2 \mathbf{I}_M \right)^{-1} \hat{\mathbf{H}}_{j}

\mathbf{V}^{\textrm{S-MMSE}}_j = \left( \hat{\mathbf{H}}_j \hat{\mathbf{H}}_j^H + \sum_{i=1}^K \mathbf{C}_{ji} + \sum_{l=1, l\neq j}^L \sum_{i=1}^K \mathbf{R}_{li} + \sigma^2 \mathbf{I}_M \right)^{-1} \hat{\mathbf{H}}_{j}

where L and K denote the number of cells and UEs per cell, \hat{\mathbf{H}}_j\in \mathbb{C}^{M\times K} is the estimated channel matrix from the UEs in cell j, and \mathbf{R}_{li} and \mathbf{C}_{li} are the covariance matrices of the channel and the channel estimation errors of UE i in cell l, respectively. While M-MMSE combining uses estimates of the channels from all UEs in all cells, the simpler S-MMSE combining uses only channel estimates from the UEs in the own cell. Importantly, we show that Massive MIMO with M-MMSE combining has unlimited capacity while Massive MIMO with S-MMSE combining has not! This behavior is shown in the following figure:

In the light of this new result, I wish that we would not have made the following remark in our 2011 Allerton paper:

“Note that a BS could theoretically estimate
all channel matrices \mathbf{H}_l (…) to further
improve the performance. Nevertheless, high path loss to
neighboring cells is likely to render these channel estimates unreliable and the potential performance gains are expected to be marginal.”

We could not have been more wrong about it!

In summary, although we did not understand the importance of M-MMSE combining in 2011, I believe that we were asking the right questions. In particular, the consideration of individual channel covariance matrices for each UE has been an important step for the analysis of Massive MIMO systems. A key lesson that I have learned from this story for my own research is that one should always question fundamental assumptions and wisdom.

5G, Commentary, Technical insights

Massive MIMO at 60 GHz vs. 2 GHz: How Many More Antennas?

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The Brooklyn summit last week was a great event. I gave a talk (here are the slides) comparing MIMO at “PCS” (2 GHz) and mmWave (60 GHz) in line-of-sight. There are two punchlines: first, scientifically, while a link budget calculation might predict that 128.000 mmWave antennas are needed to match up the performance of 128-antenna PCS MIMO, there is a countervailing effect in that increasing the number of antennas improves channel orthogonality so that only 10.000 antennas are required. Second, practically, although 10.000 is a lot less than 128.000, it is still a very large number! Here is a writeup with some more detail on the comparison.

I also touched the (for sub-5 GHz bands somewhat controversial) topic of hybrid beamforming, and whether that would reduce the required amount of hardware.

A question from the audience was whether the use of antennas with larger physical aperture (i.e., intrinsic directivity) would change the conclusions. The answer is no: the use of directional antennas is more or less equivalent to sectorization. The problem is that to exploit the intrinsic gain, the antennas must a priori point “in the right direction”. Hence, in the array, only a subset of the antennas will be useful when serving a particular terminal. This impacts both the channel gain (reduced effective aperture) and orthogonality (see, e.g, Figure 7.5 in this book).

There was also a stimulating panel discussion afterwards. One question discussed in the panel concerned the necessity, or desirability, of using multiple terminal antennas at mmWave. Looking only at the link budget, base station antennas could be traded against terminal antennas – however, that argument neglects the inevitably lost orthogonality, and furthermore it is not obvious how beam-finding/tracking algorithms will perform (millisecond coherence time at pedestrian speeds!). Also, obviously, the comparison I presented is extremely simplistic – to begin with, the line-of-sight scenario is extremely favorable for mmWaves (blocking problems), but also, I entirely neglected polarization losses. Solely any attempts to compensate for these problems are likely to require multiple terminal antennas.

Other topics touched in the panel were the viability of Massive MIMO implementations. Perhaps the most important comment in this context made was by Ian Wong of National Instruments: “In the past year, we’ve actually shown that [massive MIMO] works in reality … To me, the biggest development is that the skeptics are being quiet.” (Read more about that here.)

5G, Beyond 5G, News, Technical insights

How Much Performance is Lost by FDD Operation?

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There has been a long-standing debate on the relative performance between reciprocity-based (TDD) Massive MIMO and that of FDD solutions based on grid-of-beams, or hybrid beamforming architectures. The matter was, for example, the subject of a heated debate in the 2015 Globecom industry panel “Massive MIMO vs FD-MIMO: Defining the next generation of MIMO in 5G” where on the one hand, the commercial arguments for grid-of-beams solutions were clear, but on the other hand, their real potential for high-performance spatial multiplexing was strongly contested.

While it is known that grid-of-beams solutions perform poorly in isotropic scattering, no prior experimental results are known. This new paper:

Massive MIMO Performance—TDD Versus FDD: What Do Measurements Say?

answers this performance question through the analysis of real Massive MIMO channel measurement data obtained at the 2.6 GHz band. Except for in certain line-of-sight (LOS) environments, the original reciprocity-based TDD Massive MIMO represents the only effective implementation of Massive MIMO at the frequency bands under consideration.

Beyond 5G, Commentary, Technical insights

Relative Value of Spectrum

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What is more worth? 1 MHz bandwidth at 100 MHz carrier frequency, or 10 MHz bandwidth at 1 GHz carrier? Conventional wisdom has it that higher carrier frequencies are more valuable because “there is more bandwidth there”. In this post, I will explain why that is not entirely correct.

The basic presumption of TDD/reciprocity-based Massive MIMO is that all activity, comprising the transmission of uplink pilots, uplink data and downlink data, takes place inside of a coherence interval:

At fixed mobility, in meter/second, the dimensionality of the coherence interval is proportional to the wavelength, because the Doppler spread is proportional to the carrier frequency.

In a single cell, with max-min fairness power control (for uniform quality-of-service provision), the sum-throughput of Massive MIMO can be computed analytically and is given by the following formula:

In this formula,

  • $B$ = bandwidth in Hertz (split equally between uplink and downlink)
  • $M$ = number of base station antennas
  • $K$ = number of multiplexed terminals
  • $B_c$ = coherence bandwidth in Hertz (independent of carrier frequency)
  • $T_c$ = coherence time in seconds (inversely proportional to carrier frequency)
  • SNR = signal-to-noise ratio (“normalized transmit power”)
  • $\beta_k$ = path loss for the k:th terminal
  • $\gamma_k$ = constant, close to $\beta_k$ with sufficient pilot power

This formula assumes independent Rayleigh fading, but the general conclusions remain under other models.

The factor that pre-multiplies the logarithm depends on $K$.
The pre-log factor is maximized when $K=B_c T_c/2$. The maximal value is $B B_c T_c/8$, which is proportional to $T_c$, and therefore proportional to the wavelength. Due to the multiplication $B T_c$, one can get same pre-log factor using a smaller bandwidth by instead increasing the wavelength, i.e., reducing the carrier frequency. At the same time, assuming appropriate scaling of the number of antennas, $M$, with the number of terminals, $K$, the quantity inside of the logarithm is a constant.

Concluding, the sum spectral efficiency (in b/s/Hz) easily can double for every doubling of the wavelength: a megahertz of bandwidth at 100 MHz carrier is ten times more worth than a megahertz of bandwidth at a 1 GHz carrier. So while there is more bandwidth available at higher carriers, the potential multiplexing gains are correspondingly smaller.

In this example,

all three setups give the same sum-throughput, however, the throughput per terminal is vastly different.