Most of the populated parts of the world have cellular network coverage. You have likely seen base station antennas at both rooftops and in towers, but have you reflected on what the different boxes are?
In the following short video, I take you on a tour of a 4G cell site in Stockholm, where there are antennas and radios for the 700-900 MHz, 1.8+2.1 GHz, and 2.6 GHz bands.
We have now released the 43rd episode of the podcast Wireless Future. It has the following abstract:
There are many textbooks to choose between when learning the basics of wireless communications. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss the recent book “Introduction to Multiple Antenna Communications and Reconfigurable Surfaces” that Emil has written together with Özlem Tugfe Demir. The conversation focuses on ten subtopics that are covered by the book and differentiates it from many previous textbooks. These are related to the dimensionality of physical constants, the choice of performance metrics, and the motivation behind OFDM signaling. Various system modeling characteristics are discussed, including how the antenna array geometry impacts the channel, dual-polarized signals, carrier frequency dependencies, and the connection between models for small-scale fading and radar cross-sections. The role of non-orthogonal multiple access, hybrid beamforming, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces are also covered. The textbook is meant for teaching an introductory course on the topic and can be freely downloaded from https://www.nowpublishers.com/NowOpen
You can watch the video podcast on YouTube:
You can listen to the audio-only podcast at the following places:
Much wireless communication research in the past five years has been motivated by 6G needing the results. The 6G standardization has recently begun, so in the coming years, we will see which “6G candidate technologies” will be utilized and which will not. Research papers often focus on revolutionary new features, while technology development is often evolutionary since the demand for new features comes gradually.
Although we have yet to determine what technology components will be used, there is much certainty around things like standardization timelines, new feature categories, spectrum candidates, performance metrics, and the interplay between different stakeholders. I explain this in a new 18-minute video about 6G, where I answer what 6G truly is, why it is needed, and how it is developed.
In what ways could we improve cellular-massive-MIMO based 5G? Well, to start with, this technology is already pretty good. But coverage holes, and difficulties to send multiple streams to multi-antenna users because of insufficient channel rank, remain issues.
Perhaps the ultimate solution is distributed MIMO (also known as cell-free massive MIMO). But while this is at heart a powerful technology, installing backhaul seems dreadfully expensive, and achieving accurate phase-alignment for coherent multiuser beamforming on downlink is a difficult technical problem. Another option is RIS – but they have large form factors and require a lot of training and control overhead, and probably, in practice, some form of active filtering to make them sufficiently band-selective.
A different, radically new approach is to deploy large numbers of physically small and cheap wireless repeaters, that receive and instantaneously retransmit signals – appearing as if they were ordinary scatterers in the channel, but with amplification. Repeaters, as such, are deployed today already but only in niche use cases. Could they be deployed at scale, in swarms, within the cells? What would be required of the repeaters, and how well could a repeater-assisted cellular massive MIMO system work, compared to distributed MIMO? What are the fundamental limits of this technology?
At last, some significant new research directions for the wireless PHY community!
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.00142
If you want to develop a strong foundational knowledge of MIMO technology, I recommend you to read our new book Introduction to Multiple Antenna Communications and Reconfigurable Surfaces.
The PDF is available for free from the publisher’s website, and you can download the simulation code and answers to the exercises from GitHub.
I am amazed at how many people have already downloaded the PDF. However, books should ideally be read in physical format, so we have arranged a special offer for you. Until May 15, you can also buy color-printed copies of the book for only $50 (the list price is $145). To get that price, click on “Buy Book” at the publisher’s website, enter the discount code 919110, and unselect “Add Track & Trace Shipping” (the courier service costs extra).
Here is a video where I explain why we wrote the book and who it is for:
I receive many questions from students and researchers on social media, including this blog, YouTube, and ResearchGate. I do my best to answer such questions while commuting to work or having few minutes between meetings. I receive some questions quite frequently, making it worth creating videos where I try to answer them once and for all.
Below, you can find the first video in that series, and it answers the question: How many beams can you send from a MIMO array? As you will notice when watching the video, we obtain a more appropriate question if “can you send” is replaced by “do you want to send”.
If you have remaining doubts or comments after watching it, please feel free to post a comment on YouTube.
The way that mobile communication networks are designed changed dramatically with the advent of 5G. In the past, it was all about utilizing large bandwidths and deploying many base stations. Nowadays, we are instead equipping each base station and smartphone with multiple antennas, which enables us to use signal processing algorithms to improve signal strength, enhance reliability, and send more data of the same spectrum by controlling the spatial direction of each signal layer. In essence, we refine the hardware and algorithms instead of deploying more infrastructure and requiring more signal resources.
Further dramatic changes are envisioned in the 6G era, where the use of even larger antenna arrays uncovers near-field effects, conventional frequency bands will be complemented with millimeter and sub-terahertz spectrum, optimized reflections from reconfigurable surfaces might improve propagation conditions, and communication networks can provide new localization and sensing services.
These extraordinary changes will affect not only the wireless technology but also the required knowledge and skills among the engineers and researchers who will implement it. Hence, it is essential to revise the curriculum in basic wireless communication courses to shift focus onto these new aspects of the physical layer.
When I realized the need for a new basic textbook, I joined forces with Özlem Tuğfe Demir to write “Introduction to Multiple Antenna Communications and Reconfigurable Surfaces”, NowOpen (2024). The book provides a gentle introduction to multiple antenna communications with a focus on system modeling, channel capacity theory, algorithms, and practical implications. The reader is expected to be familiar with basic signals and systems, linear algebra, probability theory, and digital communications, but a comprehensive recap is provided in the book. Once the fundamental point-to-point and multi-user MIMO theory and its practical implications have been covered, we also demonstrate how similar methodologies are used for wireless localization, radar sensing, and optimization of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.
The first draft of the book was written for the first-year Master course TSKS14 Multiple Antenna Communications at Linköping University. You might have seen the YouTube video series that I produced while teaching that course during the pandemic. The book covers the same things and much more, and it contains numerous new examples and exercises.
The writing process focused on pinpointing all the technical and practical know-how that we believe the next-generation wireless engineers must have within this topic. We then wrote the text as a story that leads to these points. The writing has taken a long time: four years of progressive course material development followed by two years of intense writing with the goal of completing a book.
Our ambition has not been to write the one-and-only textbook on the topic, but the book that one should read first to build a deep knowledge foundation. After that, one can continue reading books such as “Fundamentals of Massive MIMO,” “Massive MIMO Networks,” or “Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO,” depending on personal preference.
The book is published with open access and accompanying MATLAB code that reproduces all the simulation results. You can access the PDF from the publisher’s website, where you can also buy printed copies. We are extremely proud of the book and hope you will like it too!