No Arabic abstract
Due to the power consumption and high circuit cost in antenna arrays, the practical application of massive multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) in the sixth generation (6G) and future wireless networks is still challenging. Employing lowresolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and hybrid analog and digital (HAD) structure is two low-cost choice with acceptable performance loss. In this paper, the combination of the mixedADC architecture and HAD structure employed at receiver is proposed for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, which will be applied to the beamforming tracking and alignment in 6G. By adopting the additive quantization noise model, the exact closedform expression of the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the HAD architecture with mixed-ADCs is derived. Moreover, the closed-form expression of the performance loss factor is derived as a benchmark. In addition, to take power consumption into account, energy efficiency is also investigated in our paper. The numerical results reveal that the HAD structure with mixedADCs can significantly reduce the power consumption and hardware cost. Furthermore, that architecture is able to achieve a better trade-off between the performance loss and the power consumption. Finally, adopting 2-4 bits of resolution may be a good choice in practical massive MIMO systems.
High hardware cost and high power consumption of massive multiple-input and multiple output (MIMO) are still two challenges for the future wireless communications including beyond 5G. Adopting the low-resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is viewed as a promising solution. Additionally, the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is an indispensable technology for beam alignment and tracking in massive MIMO systems. Thus, in this paper, the performance of DOA estimation for massive MIMO receive array with mixed-ADC structure is first investigated, where one part of radio frequency (RF) chains are connected with high-resolution ADCs and the remaining ones are connected with low-resolution ADCs. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for this architecture is derived based on the additive quantization noise model approximation for the effect of low-resolution ADCs. Then, the root-MUSIC method is designed for such a receive structure. Eventually, a performance loss factor and the associated energy efficiency factor is defined for analysis in detail. Simulation results find that a mixed-ADC architecture can strike a good balance among RMSE performance, circuit cost and energy efficiency. More importantly, just 1-4 bits of low-resolution ADCs can achieve a satisfactory performance for DOA measurement.
As massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) becomes popular, direction of arrival (DOA) measurement has been made a real renaissance due to the high-resolution achieved. Thus, there is no doubt about DOA estimation using massive MIMO. The purpose of this paper is to describe its basic principles and key techniques, to present the performance analysis, and to appreciate its engineering applications. It is anticipated that there are still many challenges in DOA estimation using massive receive MIMO, such as high circuit cost, high energy consumption and high complexity of the algorithm implementation. New researches and breakthroughs are illustrated to deal with those problems. Then, a new architecture, hybrid analog and digital (HAD) massive receive MIMO with low-resolution ADCs, is presented to strike a good balance among circuit cost, complexity and performance. Then, a novel three-dimensional (3D) angle of arrival (AOA) localization method based on geometrical center is proposed to compute the position of a passive emitter using single base station equipped with an ultra-massive MIMO system. And, it can achieve the Cramer-Rao low bound (CRLB). Here, the performance loss is also analyzed to quantify the minimum number of bits. DOA estimation will play a key role in lots of applications, such as directional modulation, beamforming tracking and alignment for 5G/6G.
In order to reduce hardware complexity and power consumption, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems employ low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) to acquire quantized measurements $boldsymbol y$. This poses new challenges to the channel estimation problem, and the sparse prior on the channel coefficient vector $boldsymbol x$ in the angle domain is often used to compensate for the information lost during quantization. By interpreting the sparse prior from a probabilistic perspective, we can assume $boldsymbol x$ follows certain sparse prior distribution and recover it using approximate message passing (AMP). However, the distribution parameters are unknown in practice and need to be estimated. Due to the increased computational complexity in the quantization noise model, previous works either use an approximated noise model or manually tune the noise distribution parameters. In this paper, we treat both signals and parameters as random variables and recover them jointly within the AMP framework. The proposed approach leads to a much simpler parameter estimation method, allowing us to work with the quantization noise model directly. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance under various noise levels and does not require parameter tuning, making it a practical and maintenance-free approach for channel estimation.
Multiple signal classification (MUSIC) has been widely applied in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receivers for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. To reduce the cost of radio frequency (RF) chains operating at millimeter-wave bands, hybrid analog-digital structure has been adopted in massive MIMO transceivers. In this situation, the received signals at the antennas are unavailable to the digital receiver, and as a consequence, the spatial covariance matrix (SCM), which is essential in MUSIC algorithm, cannot be obtained using traditional sample average approach. Based on our previous work, we propose a novel algorithm for SCM reconstruction in hybrid massive MIMO systems with multiple RF chains. By switching the analog beamformers to a group of predetermined DOAs, SCM can be reconstructed through the solutions of a set of linear equations. In addition, based on insightful analysis on that linear equations, a low-complexity algorithm, as well as a careful selection of the predetermined DOAs, will be also presented in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can reconstruct the SCM accurately so that MUSIC algorithm can be well used for DOA estimation in hybrid massive MIMO systems with multiple RF chains.
DOA estimation for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system can provide ultra-high-resolution angle estimation. However, due to the high computational complexity and cost of all digital MIMO systems, a hybrid analog digital (HAD) structure MIMO was proposed. In this paper, a fast ambiguous phase elimination method is proposed to solve the problem of direction-finding ambiguity caused by the HAD MIMO. Only two-data-blocks are used to realize DOA estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed method can greatly reduce the estimation delay with a slight performance loss.