Optimal Resource Allocation In Coordinated Multi Cell Systems

The use of multiple antennas at base stations is a key component in the design of cellular communication systems that can meet high-capacity demands in the downlink. Under ideal conditions, the gain of employing multiple antennas is well-recognized : the data throughput increases linearly with the number of transmit antennas if the spatial dimension is utilized to serve many users in parallel. The practical performance of multi-cell systems is, however, limited by a variety of nonidealities, such as insufficient channel knowledge, high computational complexity, heterogeneous user conditions, limited backhaul capacity, transceiver impairments, and the constrained level of coordination between base stations.

Optimal Resource Allocation in Coordinated Multi-Cell Systems provides a solid grounding and understanding for optimization of practical multi-cell systems and will be of interest to all researchers and engineers working on the practical design of such systems.

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is considered as an heir of the multi-user MIMO technology and it has gained lots of attention from both academia and industry since the last decade. By equipping base stations (BSs) with hundreds of antennas in a compact array or a distributed manner, this new technology can provide very large multiplexing gains by serving many users on the same time-frequency resources and thereby bring significant improvements in spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) over the current wireless networks. The transmit power, pilot training, and spatial transmission resources need to be allocated properly to the users to achieve the highest possible performance. This is called resource allocation and can be formulated as design utility optimization problems. If the resource allocation in Massive MIMO is optimized, the technology can handle the exponential growth in both wireless data traffic and number of wireless devices, which cannot be done by the current cellular network technology. In this thesis, we focus on the five different resource allocation aspects in Massive MIMO communications: The first part of the thesis studies if power control and advanced coordinated multipoint (CoMP) techniques are able to bring substantial gains to multi-cell Massive MIMO systems compared to the systems without using CoMP. More specifically, we consider a network topology with no cell boundary where the BSs can collaborate to serve the users in the considered coverage area. We focus on a downlink (DL) scenario in which each BS transmits different data signals to each user. This scenario does not require phase synchronization between BSs and therefore has the same backhaul requirements as conventional Massive MIMO systems, where each user is preassigned to only one BS. The scenario where all BSs are phase synchronized to send the same data is also included for comparison. We solve a total transmit power minimization problem in order to observe how much power Massive MIMO BSs consume to provide the requested quality of service (QoS) of each user. A max-min fairness optimization is also solved to provide every user with the same maximum QoS regardless of the propagation conditions. The second part of the thesis considers a joint pilot design and uplink (UL) power control problem in multi-cell Massive MIMO. The main motivation for this work is that the pilot assignment and pilot power allocation is momentous in Massive MIMO since the BSs are supposed to construct linear detection and precoding vectors from the channel estimates. Pilot contamination between pilot-sharing users leads to more interference during data transmission. The pilot design is more difficult if the pilot signals are reused frequently in space, as in Massive MIMO, which leads to greater pilot contamination effects. Related works have only studied either the pilot assignment or the pilot power control, but not the joint optimization. Furthermore, the pilot assignment is usually formulated as a combinatorial problem leading to prohibitive computational complexity. Therefore, in the second part of this thesis, a new pilot design is proposed to overcome such challenges by treating the pilot signals as continuous optimization variables. We use those pilot signals to solve different max-min fairness optimization problems with either ideal hardware or hardware impairments. The third part of this thesis studies a two-layer decoding method that mitigates inter-cell interference in multi-cell Massive MIMO systems. In layer one, each BS estimates the channels to intra-cell users and uses the estimates for local decoding within the cell. This is followed by a second decoding layer where the BSs cooperate to mitigate inter-cell interference. An UL achievable SE expression is computed for arbitrary two-layer decoding schemes, while a closed form expression is obtained for correlated Rayleigh fading channels, maximum-ratio combining (MRC), and largescale fading decoding (LSFD) in the second layer. We formulate a sum SE maximization problem with both the data power and LSFD vectors as optimization variables. Since the problem is non-convex, we develop an algorithm based on the weighted minimum mean square error (MMSE) approach to obtain a stationary point with low computational complexity. Motivated by recent successes of deep learning in predicting the solution to an optimization problem with low runtime, the fourth part of this thesis investigates the use of deep learning for power control optimization in Massive MIMO. We formulate the joint data and pilot power optimization for maximum sum SE in multi-cell Massive MIMO systems, which is a non-convex problem. We propose a new optimization algorithm, inspired by the weighted MMSE approach, to obtain a stationary point in polynomial time. We then use this algorithm together with deep learning to train a convolutional neural network to perform the joint data and pilot power control in sub-millisecond runtime. The solution is suitable for online optimization. Finally, the fifth part of this thesis considers a large-scale distributed antenna system that serves the users by coherent joint transmission called Cell-free Massive MIMO. For a given user set, only a subset of the access points (APs) is likely needed to satisfy the users' performance demands. To find a flexible and energy-efficient implementation, we minimize the total power consumption at the APs in the DL, considering both the hardware consumed and transmit powers, where APs can be turned off to reduce the former part. Even though this is a nonconvex optimization problem, a globally optimal solution is obtained by solving a mixed-integer second-order cone program (SOCP). We also propose low-complexity algorithms that exploit group-sparsity or received power strength in the problem formulation.

This reference text discusses advances in wireless communication, design challenges, and future research directions to design reliable wireless communication. The text discusses emerging technologies including wireless sensor networks, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, mm-Wave, Massive MIMO, cognitive radios (CR), visible light communication (VLC), wireless optical communication, signal processing, and channel modeling. The text covers artificial intelligence-based applications in wireless communication, machine learning techniques and challenges in wireless sensor networks, and deep learning for channel and bandwidth estimation during optical wireless communication. The text will be useful for senior undergraduate, graduate students, and professionals in the fields of electrical engineering, and electronics and communication engineering.

This SpringerBrief discusses the current research on coordinated multipoint transmission/reception (CoMP) in wireless multi-cell systems. This book analyzes the structure of the CoMP precoders and the message exchange mechanism in the CoMP system in order to reveal the advantage of CoMP. Topics include interference management in wireless cellular networks, joint signal processing, interference coordination, uplink and downlink precoding and system models. After an exploration of the motivations and concepts of CoMP, the authors present the architectures of a CoMP system. Practical implementation and operational challenges of CoMP are discussed in detail. Also included is a review of CoMP architectures and deployment scenarios in the LTE-Advanced standard. Readers are exposed to the latest multiuser precoding designs for the CoMP system under two operating modes, interference aware and interference coordination. Wireless Coordinated Multi cell Systems: Architectures and Precoding Designs is a concise and approachable tool for researchers, professionals and advanced-level students interested in wireless communications and networks.

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