When I started my research career in 2007, relaying was a very popular topic. It was part of the broader area of cooperative communications, where the communication between the transmitter and the receiver is aided by other nodes that are located in between. This could be anything between a transparent relay that retransmits the signal that reaches it after amplification in the analog domain (so-called amplify-and-forward), to a regenerative relay to processes and optimizes the signal in the digital baseband before retransmission.

There is a large number of different relaying protocols and information theory that underpins the technology. Relaying is supported by many wireless standards but has not become a major commercial success, possibly because the deployment of “pico-cells” is more attractive to network operators looking for improved local-area coverage.

Is relaying is a technology whose time has come?

A resurrection of the relaying topic can be observed in the beyond 5G era. Many researchers are considering a particular kind of relays being called a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), intelligent reflecting surface, or software-controlled metasurface. Despite the different names and repeated claims of RIS being something fundamentally new, it is clearly a relaying technology. An RIS is a node that receives the signal from the transmitter and then re-radiates it with controllable time-delays. An RIS consists of many small elements that can be assigned different time-delays and thereby synthesize the scattering behavior of an arbitrarily-shaped object of the same size. This feature can, for instance, be used to beamform the signal towards the receiver as shown in the figure below.

Using the conventional terminology, an RIS is a full-duplex transparent relay since the signals are processed in the analog domain and the surface can receive and re-transmit waves simultaneously. The protocol resembles classical amplify-and-forward, except that the signals are not amplified. The main idea is instead to have a very large surface area so it can then capture an unusually large fraction of the signal power and use the large aperture to re-radiate narrow beams.

Conventional full-duplex relays suffer from loop-back interference, where the amplified signals leak into the yet-to-be-amplified signals in the relay. This issue is avoided in the RIS technology but is replaced by several other fundamental research challenges. In our new paper “Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Three Myths and Two Critical Questions“, we are pointing out the two most burning research questions that must be answered. We are also debunking three myths surrounding the RIS, whereof one is related to relaying.

I have also recorded a YouTube video explaining the fundamentals:

The channel fading in traditional frequency bands (below 6 GHz) is often well described by the Rayleigh fading model, at least in non-line-of-sight scenarios. This model says that the channel coefficient between any transmit antenna and receive antenna is complex Gaussian distributed, so that its magnitude is Rayleigh distributed.

If there are multiple antennas at the transmitter and/or receiver, then it is common to assume that different pairs of antennas are subject to independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) fading. This model is called i.i.d. Rayleigh fading and dominates the academic literature to such an extent that one might get the impression that it is the standard case in practice. However, it is rather the other way around: i.i.d. Rayleigh fading only occurs in very special cases in practice, such as having a uniform linear array with half-wavelength-spaced isotropic antennas that is deployed in a rich scattering environment where the multi-paths are uniformly distributed in all directions. If one would remove any of these very specific assumptions then the channel coefficients will become mutually correlated. I covered the basics of spatial correlation in a previous blog post.

In reality, the channel fading will always be correlated

Some reasons for this are: 1) planar arrays exhibit correlation along the diagonals, since not all adjacent antennas can be half-wavelength-spaced; 2) the antennas have non-isotropic radiation patterns; 3) there will be more multipath components from some directions than from other directions.

With this in mind, I have dedicated a lot of my work to analyzing MIMO communications with correlated Rayleigh fading. In particular, our book “Massive MIMO networks” presents a framework for analyzing multi-user MIMO systems that are subject to correlated fading. When we started the writing, I thought spatial correlation was a phenomenon that was important to cover to match reality but would have a limited impact on the end results. I have later understood that spatial correlation is fundamental to understand how communication systems work. In particular, the modeling of spatial correlation changes the game when it comes to pilot contamination: it is an entirely negative effect under i.i.d. Rayleigh fading models, while a proper analysis based on spatial correlation reveals that one can sometimes benefit from purposely assigning the same pilots to users and then separate them based on their spatial correlation properties.

Future applications for spatial correlation models

The book “Massive MIMO networks” presents a framework for channel estimation and computation of achievable rates with uplink receive combining and downlink precoding for correlated Rayleigh fading channels. Although the title of the book implies that it is about Massive MIMO, the results apply to many beyond-5G research topics. Let me give two concrete examples:

1. Cell-free Massive MIMO: In this topic, many geographically distributed access points are jointly serving all the users in the network. This is essentially a single-cell Massive MIMO system where the access points can be viewed as the distributed antennas of a single base station. The channel estimation and computation of achievable rates can be carried out as described “Massive MIMO networks”. The key differences are instead related to which precoding/combining schemes that are considered practically implementable and the reuse of pilots within a cell (which is possible thanks to the strong spatial correlation).
   
2. Extremely Large Aperture Arrays: There are other names for this category, such as holographic MIMO, large intelligent surfaces, and ultra-massive MIMO. The new terminologies are used to indicate the use of co-located arrays that are much larger (in terms of the number of antennas and the physical size) than what is currently considered by the industry when implementing Massive MIMO in 5G. In this case, the spatial correlation matrices must be computed differently than described in “Massive MIMO networks”, for example, to take near-field effects and shadow fading variations into consideration. However, once the spatial correlation matrices have been computed, then the same framework for channel estimation and computation of achievable rates is applicable.

The bottom line is that we can analyze many new exciting beyond-5G technologies by making use of the analytical frameworks developed in the past decade. There is no need to reinvent the wheel but we should reuse as much as possible from previous research and then focus on the novel components. Spatial correlation is something that we know how to deal with and this must not be forgotten.

The good side of the social distancing that is currently taking place is that I have spent more time recording video material than usual. For example, I was supposed to give a tutorial entitled “Signal Processing for MIMO Communications Beyond 5G” at ICASSP 2020 in Barcelona in the beginning of May. This conference has now turned into an online event with free registration. Hence, anyone can attend the tutorial that I am giving together with Jiayi Zhang from Beijing Jiaotong University. We have prerecorded the presentations, which will be broadcasted to the conference attendees on May 4, but will be available for live discussions in between each video segment.

As a teaser for this tutorial, I have uploaded the 30 minute introduction to YouTube:

In this video, I explain what Massive MIMO is, what role it plays in 5G, why there will be a large gap between the theoretical performance and what is achieved in practice, and what might come next. In particular, I explain my philosophy regarding 6G research.

The remaining 2.5 hours of the tutorial will only be available from ICASSP. I hope to meet you online on May 4!