Grant: Alliance Grants

Favorable propagation studies for massive MIMO systems: mMIMO is a key technology for 5G and beyond, due to its ability to deliver high spectral efficiency/rate in multi-user environments using simplified (linear) processing. Its advantages can be fully exploited under certain conditions known compactly as "favorable propagation" (FP). Unlike the known methods, which rely on sophisticated beamforming algorithms (e.g. successive interference cancellation, maximum SNR or minimum mean square error) and thus are difficult to implement when the number of antennas is large, our approach targets reducing drastically implementation's complexity and improving its robustness by exploiting the FP property. The known FP studies were carried out in simplified environments, and under a number of simplified assumptions. It remains unclear whether FP will hold in realistic 5G environments under practical constraints. This project will address these issues by studying the FP in realistic propagation environments (multipath propagation, correlated fading), for moderate to large number of antennas various user configurations and array geometries, with implementation errors included. The results of performance analysis will be used to optimize system design and performance and to develop processing algorithms under various practical constraints.