All posts by Emil Björnson

Commentary, Podcast, Technical insights

Episode 5: Millimeter Wave Communication

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We have now released the fifth episode of the podcast Wireless Future, with the following abstract:

What happened to millimeter wave communications? It is often described as synonymous with 5G, but barely any of the brand new 5G networks make use of it. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss the basic properties of millimeter waves, whether it is the long sought “holy grail” in wireless communications, and where the technology stands today. To learn more, they recommend the articles “Antenna Count for Massive MIMO: 1.9 GHz versus 60 GHz” and “Massive MIMO in Sub-6 GHz and mmWave: Physical, Practical, and Use-Case Differences”.

You can watch the video podcast on YouTube:

You can listen to the audio-only podcast at the following places:

5G, Beyond 5G, News

Globecom Tutorial on Cell-free Massive MIMO

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I am giving a tutorial on “Beyond Massive MIMO: User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO” at Globecom 2020, together with my colleagues Luca Sanguinetti and Özlem Tuğfe Demir. It is a prerecorded 3-hour tutorial that can be viewed online at any time during the conference and there will be a live Q/A session on December 11 where we are available for questions.

The tutorial is based on our upcoming book on the topic: Foundations on User-Centric Cell-free Massive MIMO.

Until December 11 (the last day of the tutorial), we are offering a free preprint of the book, which can be downloaded by creating an account at the NOW publishers’ website. By doing so, I think you will also get notified when the final version of the book is available early next year, so you can gain access to the final PDF and an offer to buy printed copies.

If you download the book and have any feedback that we can take into account when preparing the final version, we will highly appreciate to receive it! Please email me your feedback by December 15. You find the address in the PDF.

The abstract of the tutorial is as follows:

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a promising concept for cellular networks-in 2019 5G it became a reality, with 64-antenna fully digital base stations being commercially deployed in many countries. However, this is not the final destination in a world where ubiquitous wireless access is in demand by an increasing population. It is, therefore, time for MIMO and mmWave communication researchers to consider new multi-antenna technologies that might lay the foundations for beyond 5G networks. In particular, we need to focus on improving the uniformity of the service quality.

Suppose all the base station antennas are distributed over the coverage area instead of co-located in arrays at a few elevated locations, so that the mobile terminals are surrounded by antennas instead of having a few base stations surrounded by mobile terminals. How can we operate such a network? The ideal solution is to let each mobile terminal be served by coherent joint transmission and reception from all the antennas that can make a non-negligible impact on their performance. That effectively leads to a user-centric post-cellular network architecture, called “User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO”. Recent papers have developed innovative signal processing and radio resource allocation algorithms to make this new technology possible, and the industry has taken steps towards implementation. Substantial performance gains compared to small-cell networks (where each distributed antenna operates autonomously) and cellular Massive MIMO have been demonstrated in numerical studies, particularly, when it comes to the uniformity of the achievable data rates over the coverage area.

Commentary, Podcast, Technical insights

Episode 4: Is Wireless Technology Secure?

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We have now released the fourth episode of the podcast Wireless Future, with the following abstract:

We are creating a society that is increasingly reliant on access to wireless connectivity. In Sweden, you can barely pay for parking without a mobile phone. Will this wireless future have a negative impact on the security of our data and privacy? In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discuss security threats to wireless technology, including eavesdropping, jamming, and spoofing. What impact can these illegitimate techniques have on our lives and what do we need to be aware of?

You can watch the video podcast on YouTube:

You can listen to the audio-only podcast at the following places:

5G, Education, Technical insights

Cracking the Pilot Contamination Nut

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When T. Marzetta introduced the Massive MIMO concept in his seminal article from 2010, he concluded that “the phenomenon of pilot contamination impose[s] fundamental limitations on what can be achieved with a noncooperative cellular multiuser MIMO system.”

More precisely, he showed that the channel capacity under i.i.d. Rayleigh fading converges to a finite limit as the number of base stations goes to infinity.  The value of this limit is determined by the interference level in the channel estimation phase. There are hundreds of papers on IEEEXplore that deals with the pilot contamination issue, trying to push the limit upwards or achieve higher performance for a given number of antennas. Various advanced mitigation methods have been developed to cure the symptoms of pilot contamination.

But was pilot contamination really a fundamental limitation to start with? In 2018, we published a paper called “Massive MIMO Has Unlimited Capacity” where we showed that there is an unexpectedly simple solution to the problem. You don’t need a sledgehammer to “crack the pilot contamination nut“, but the right combination of state-of-the-art tools will do. While I have written about this in previous blog posts and briefly mentioned it in videos, I have finally recorded a comprehensive lecture on the topic. It is 82 minutes long and was given online by invitation from Hacettepe University, Turkey. No previous knowledge on the topic is required. I hope you will enjoy it in small or big doses!

Beyond 5G, Commentary, Podcast, Technical insights

Episode 3: Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

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We have now released the third episode of the podcast Wireless Future, with the following abstract:

The research towards 6G has already been initiated. One of the most hyped concepts in the research community is “reconfigurable intelligent surfaces”, which can be utilized to create smart walls that capture wireless signals and reflect them towards the user device. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss the prospects and limitations of this new technology. Is it the next big thing in wireless? To learn more, they recommend their new overview article “Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Three Myths and Two Critical Questions”, to appear in IEEE Communications Magazine, which can be downloaded at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03377.

You can watch the video podcast on YouTube:

You can listen to the audio-only podcast at the following places:

5G, News, Technical insights

Digital Millimeter Beamforming for 5G Terminals

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5G used to be described as synonymous with millimeter-wave communications, but now when 5G networks are being rolled out all around the world, the focus is instead on Massive MIMO in the 3 GHz band. Moreover, millimeter-wave communications used to be synonymous with hybrid beamforming (e.g., using multiple analog phased arrays), often described as a necessary compromise between performance and hardware complexity. However, digital implementations are already on the way.

Last year, I wrote about experiments by NEC with a 24-antenna base station that carries out digital beamforming in the 28 GHz band. The same convergence towards digital solutions is happening for the chips that can be used in 5G terminals. The University of Michigan published experimental results at the 2020 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC) regarding a 16-element prototype for the 28 GHz band. The university calls it the “first digital single-chip millimeter-wave beamformer“. It is manufactured as a single chip using 40 nm CMOS technology and has a dimension of around 3 x 3 mm. The chip doesn’t include the 16 antenna elements (which are connected to it, see the image below and click on it to find larger images) but transceiver chains with low-noise amplifiers, phase-locked loops, analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), etc. While each antenna element has a separate ADC, groups of four adjacent ADCs are summing up their digital signals before they reach the baseband processor. Hence, from a MIMO perspective, this is essentially a digital four-antenna receiver.

One reason to call this a prototype rather than a full-fleshed solution is that the chip can only function as a receiver, but this doesn’t take away the fact that this is an important step forward. In an interview with the Michigan Engineering News Center, Professor Michael P. Flynn (who lead the research) is explaining that “With analog beamforming, you can only listen to one thing at a time” and “This chip represents more than seven years of work by multiple generations of graduate students”.

Needless to say, the first 5G base stations and cell phones that support millimeter-wave bands will make use of hybrid beamforming architectures. For example, the Ericsson Street Macro 6701 (that Verizon is utilizing in their network) contains multiple phased arrays, which can take 4 inputs and thereby produce up to 4 simultaneous beams. However, while the early adopters are making use of hybrid architectures, it becomes increasingly likely that fully digital architectures will be available when millimeter-wave technology becomes more widely adopted around the world.

5G, Beyond 5G, Commentary, Podcast, Technical insights

Episode 2: Myths About Massive MIMO

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We have now released the second episode of the podcast Wireless Future, with the following abstract:

There are often hypes and speculations around new wireless technologies, including “Massive MIMO”, which is the key new feature in 5G. In 2015, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson wrote the article “Massive MIMO: Ten Myths and One Critical Question” together with Thomas Marzetta. It was an attempt to dispel some of the misconceptions that were floating around at the time. In this episode, they look back at the statements they claimed to be myths to see if they were right and whether the myths are still around. The article received the 2019 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society and can be downloaded at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.06854.

You can watch the video podcast on YouTube:

You can listen to the audio-only podcast at the following places: