Grant-Free Access via Bilinear Inference for Cell-Free MIMO with Low-Coherent Pilots

We propose a novel joint activity, channel, and data estimation (JACDE) scheme for cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems compliant with fifth-generation (5G) new radio (NR) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling. The contribution aims to allow significant overhead reduction of cell-free MIMO systems by enabling grant-free access, while maintaining moderate throughput per user. To that end, we extend the conventional MIMO OFDM protocol so as to incorporate activity detection capability without resorting to spreading informative data symbols, in contrast with related work which typically relies on signal spreading. Our method leverages a Bayesian message passing scheme based on Gaussian approximation, which jointly performs active user detection (AUD), channel estimation (CE), and multi-user detection (MUD), incorporating also a well-structured low-coherent pilot design based on frame theory, which mitigates pilot contamination, and finally complemented with a detector empowered by bilinear message passing. The efficacy of the resulting JACDE-based grant-free access scheme without spreading data sequences is demonstrated by simulation results, which are shown to significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art and approach the performance of an idealized (genie-aided) scheme in which user activity and channel coefficients are perfectly known.

Full-Duplex MIMO Systems with Hardware Limitations and Imperfect Channel Estimation

We consider a bidirectional in-band full-duplex (FD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system subject to imperfect channel state information (CSI), hardware distortion, and limited analog cancellation capability as well as the self-interference (SI) power requirement at the receiver analog domain so as to avoid the saturation of low noise amplifier (LNA). A novel minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based joint design of digital precoder and combiner for SI cancellation is offered, which combines the well-known gradient projection method and non-monotonicity considered in recent machine-learning literature in order to tackle the non-convexity of the optimization problem formulated in this article. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed SI cancellation algorithm.

Discrete-Aware Matrix Completion via Proximal Gradient

We present a novel algorithm for the completion of low-rank matrices whose entries are limited to a finite discrete alphabet. The proposed method is based on the recently-emerged proximal gradient (PG) framework of optimization theory, which is applied here to solve a regularized formulation of the completion problem that includes a term enforcing the discrete-alphabet membership of the matrix entries.