On Multiantenna Cellular Communications: From Theory to Practice

Sammanfattning: Today, wireless communications are an essential part of our everyday life. Both the number of users and their demands for wireless data have increasedtremendously during the last decade. Multiantenna communicationsis a promising solution to meet this ever-growing traffic demands. However, impairments that exist in most practical communication networks may substantially limit the performance of a multiantenna system. The characterizationof such a performance loss and how to minimize that are still largelyopen problems. The present thesis addresses this important research gap. Inparticular, we focus on three major impairments of a multiantenna cellularnetwork: impairment in the channel state information (CSI), interference andimpairment in the transceiver hardware components.To fully realize the benefits of multiantenna communications, the users need to acquire a certain level of information about their propagation environment; that is, their corresponding CSI. In practice, the CSI is not known bythe users and should be acquired by allocating part of the network resourcesfor pilot transmission. This problem is mainly important in the systems with a large number of antennas, as in general the required network resources for CSI acquisition scales with the number of transmitting antennas. Theproblem of CSI acquisition in a single-cell multiuser multiple-input multipleoutput(MIMO) system is addressed in this thesis. A linear spatial precodingand combining scheme for pilot transmission is proposed. This scheme requiresless number of network resources for channel estimation compared tothe conventional schemes. The gains of the proposed scheme are characterized by finding an upper-bound and a lower-bound on the channel estimation error.Moreover, as an ultimate performance metric, an achievable sum-rate ofthe network is formulated and analyzed numerically.Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless channels, the performanceof the users in a network is intertwined; the desired signal of one user mayinterfere other users. Hence, the interference is another major impairment inwireless communication systems. In this thesis, the practical challenges of aninterference management technique, namely MIMO interference alignment isinvestigated by implementation on a multiuser MIMO testbed. Then, in thecontext of interference alignment, the problem of optimal power allocation forpilot and data transmission is studied and verified by the measurements.The impairment in the hardware components of the transceivers, that is, any deviation of the components from their ideal behavior, degrades the performance of a communication system. In particular, the impact of nonlineartransmitter power amplifiers (PA)s is investigated in this thesis. First, consideringa memoryless third-order polynomial model for the PAs, a model forthe transmitted nonlinear distortion signal from a multiantenna transmitter isproposed and validated by measurements. This model implies that the spatialdirection of the transmitted distortion is dependent on the spatial directionof the desired signal. Then, this model is extended for a general arbitrary order polynomial model. Exploiting the developed distortion model, the energyefficiency of a multiantenna system operating at millimeter wave frequenciesis studied.