Abstract
Multi-user (MU) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the promising technologies for the 5th Generation of wireless communication systems. However, as an emerging technology, various technical challenges that hinder practical use of massive MIMO need to be addressed, e.g., imperfections on channel estimation and channel reciprocity. The overall objective of the proposed research is to investigate some of the key practical challenges of implementation of the massive MIMO system and propose effective solutions for those problems. First, in order to realise promised benefits of massive MIMO, there is a need for a highly accurate technique for provisioning of channel state information (CSI). However, the acquisition of CSI can be considerably influenced by imperfect channel estimation in practice. We therefore analyse the impact of channel estimation error on the performance of massive MIMO uplinks with the considerations of the channel correlation over space. We then propose a novel antenna selection scheme by exploiting the sparsity of the channel gain matrix at the received end, which significantly reduces implementation overhead and complexity compared to the well-adopted scheme, without degrading the system performance. Second, it is known that channel reciprocity in time-division duplexing (TDD) massive MIMO systems can be exploited to reduce the overhead required for the acquisition of CSI. However, perfect reciprocity is unrealistic in practical systems due to random radio-frequency (RF) circuit mismatches in uplink and downlink channels. We model and analyse the impact of the RF mismatches by taking into account the channel estimation error. We derive closed-form expressions of the output signal-to-interference-plus- noise ratio for typical linear precoding schemes, and further investigate the asymptotic performance of the considered precoding schemes to provide insights into the practical system designs, including guidelines for the selection of the effective precoding schemes. Third, our theoretical model for analysing the effect of channel reciprocity error on massive MIMO systems reveals that the imperfections in channel reciprocity might become a performance limiting factor. In order to compensate for these imperfections, we present and investigate two calibration schemes for TDD-based MU massive MIMO systems, namely, relative calibration and inverse calibration. In particular, the design of the proposed inverse calibration takes into account a compound effect of channel reciprocity error and channel estimation error. To compare two calibration schemes, we derive closed-form expressions for the ergodic sum-rate and the receive mean-square error for downlinks. We demonstrate that the proposed inverse calibration outperforms the relative calibration, thanks to its greater robustness to the compound effect of both errors.