Eko Onggosanusi

Overview of Full-Dimension MIMO in LTE-Advanced Pro

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with a large number of base station antennas, often called massive MIMO, have received much attention in academia and industry as a means to improve the spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and processing complexity of next generation cellular systems. The mobile communication industry has initiated a feasibility study of massive MIMO systems to meet the increasing demand of future wireless systems. Field trials of the proof-of-concept systems have demonstrated the potential gain of the Full-Dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO), an official name for the MIMO enhancement in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP). 3GPP initiated standardization activity for the seamless integration of this technology into current 4G LTE systems. In this article, we provide an overview of FD-MIMO systems, with emphasis on the discussion and debate conducted on the standardization process of Release 13. We present key features for FD-MIMO systems, a summary of the major issues for the standardization and practical system design, and performance evaluations for typical FD-MIMO scenarios.

Full dimension MIMO for LTE-Advanced and 5G

Elevation beamforming and Full Dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO) has been an active area of research and standardization in 3GPP LTE-Advanced. In an FD-MIMO system, a base station with 2-dimensional (2D) active array supports multi-user joint elevation and azimuth beamforming (a.k.a. 3D beamfoming), which results in much higher cell capacity compared to conventional systems. Recent study has shown that with these new FD-MIMO technologies, we can achieve promising 3-5× gain in both cell capacity as well as cell-edge throughput. In this paper, we will provide a brief summary of recent 3GPP activities, including the recently completed 3D channel model, ongoing study on FD-MIMO scenarios, antenna/RF (radio frequency) transceiver architectures, as well as potential network performance benefits. In addition, we also discuss some methods for reducing CSI (channel state information) feedback overhead and ensuring efficient operation of large size FD-MIMO for both TDD and FDD systems.

Reduced space channel feedback for FD-MIMO

To support downlink full-dimension (FD-MIMO) in FDD scenarios, an accurate yet reasonably efficient channel-state-information (CSI) feedback scheme is required to harness the potential beamforming gain offered by the use of a large number of antenna elements in a 2D active antenna array. In this paper, a reduced-spaced channel quantization and feedback scheme which exploits slow variation of the angle-of-departure (AoD) distribution is proposed. By perceiving the instantaneous spatial channel to be a linear combination of slowly varying subset of matrices, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme offers up to 62.5% dimensionality reduction with negligible throughput loss in 16-antenna FD-MIMO system. When used together with vector quantization, the proposed scheme offers substantial gain over that supported by 3GPP LTE.

Modular and High-Resolution Channel State Information and Beam Management for 5G New Radio

This article provides an overview of key features pertaining to CSI reporting and beam management for the 5G New Radio (NR) currently being standardized in 3GPP. For CSI reporting, the modular design framework and high-resolution spatial information feedback offer not only flexibility in a host of use cases and deployment scenarios, but also improved average user throughput over state-of-the-art 4G LTE. To accommodate cellular communications in the milimeter-wave regime where a combination of analog and digital beamforming is typically used at both a base station and user equipment, beam management procedures such as measurement, reporting, and recovery are introduced. The utility and joint usage of these two features are demonstrated along with some potential upgrades for the next phase of 5G NR. Introduction