Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Titled as "Asynchronous Massive MIMO Base Station Cooperation for 5 G Networks and Beyond", this research proposal aims to study distributed cooperation schemes among base-stations, which are equipped with a large number of antennas (i.e., to support massive MIMO), to enable simultaneous communications between multiple user pairs (multiple peer-to-peer communications). Such a multi-user scenario has not been studied in the literature, despite its practical importance. The practical importance of such scenarios is further highlighted if one takes into account that the multiple users operate in a time-asynchronous manner induced by the difference in the physical locations of the users. Indeed, in this study, the network is assumed to be time-asynchronous, meaning that the signal transmitted by one user undergoes different delays to reach the base stations in the network. Furthermore, the signals transmitted by different base stations undergo different delays to a particular user. Due to this realistic model for the user links, the end-to-end user channels can be modeled only as multi-tap frequency selective links thereby requiring wideband consideration, design, and analysis of the network, while the available literature focuses on narrowband (single-carrier) schemes.