Zhengang Pan

Toward green and soft: a 5G perspective

As the deployment and commercial operation of 4G systems are speeding up, technologists worldwide have begun searching for next generation wireless solutions to meet the anticipated demands in the 2020 era given the explosive growth of mobile Internet. This article presents our perspective of the 5G technologies with two major themes: green and soft. By rethinking the Shannon theorem and traditional cell-centric design, network capacity can be significantly increased while network power consumption is decreased. The feasibility of the combination of green and soft is investigated through five interconnected areas of research: energy efficiency and spectral efficiency co-design, no more cells, rethinking signaling/control, invisible base stations, and full duplex radio.

On the Ergodic Capacity of MIMO NOMA Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is expected to be a promising multiple access technique for 5G networks due to its superior spectral efficiency. In this letter, the ergodic capacity maximization problem is first studied for the Rayleigh fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) NOMA systems with statistical channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). We propose both optimal and low complexity suboptimal power allocation schemes to maximize the ergodic capacity of MIMO NOMA system with total transmit power constraint and minimum rate constraint of the weak user. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA schemes significantly outperform the traditional orthogonal multiple access scheme.

Macro-assisted data-only carrier for 5G green cellular systems

As the commercial operation of 4G systems is speeding up worldwide to meet the increasingly explosive growth of mobile Internet in the 2020 era, a great many R&D efforts targeting the next generation wireless systems (5G) have been launched. With densely deployed small cells in a heterogeneous network, the excessive signaling overhead of conventional carrier design greatly degrades system performance. A new carrier designed for small cells in the next generation system will be highly beneficial toward a green communication network. In this article, we propose a macro-assisted data-only carrier for future 5G networks from a green prospective. With the help of macro base stations, control channel overhead, and cell-specific reference signals for small cells can be minimized to achieve a pure-data carrier. Under this architecture, key procedures are designed including small cell identification and access, synchronization, hand over, and small cell sleeping. Furthermore, to evaluate the potential of our proposed scheme, a complete system and link-level simulation platform according to the current 3GPP LTE standard is built. The simulation results show that our proposed systems, achieving significant performance enhancement of signaling overhead, can lead to more than 17 percent throughput improvement and 90 percent energy efficiency gain over the current LTE HetNet with on-off strategy implemented. The proposed scheme appears to be highly attractive as part of the future 5G green mobile networks.

Sum rate optimization for MIMO non-orthogonal multiple access systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is expected to be a promising technique for future wireless networks due to its superior spectral efficiency. In this paper, the sum rate optimization problem for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) NOMA systems is studied with the total transmit power constraint and the minimum rate constraint of weak user. We first derive a channel state information (CSI) condition in which MIMO NOMA systems can achieve full rate transmission, i.e. the transmission rate of the weak user equals to the channel capacity of weak user. Based on the CSI condition, we propose an optimal power allocation scheme for MIMO NOMA systems, which can achieve the capacity region of MIMO Broadcast channel as dirty paper coding. A low complexity suboptimal scheme is proposed as well for all CSI channel conditions. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA schemes significantly outperform the traditional time division based single user MIMO scheme and the multi-user MIMO scheme.

Large scale antenna system with hybrid digital and analog beamforming structure

Large scale antenna systems (LSAS) are expected to significantly enhance the energy efficiency (EE) and spectrum efficiency (SE) of wireless communication systems. However, there are many open issues regarding the implementation of digital beamforming (BF) structures: calibration, complexity, and cost. In a practical LSAS deployment, hybrid digital and analog BF structures with active antennas can be an alternative choice. In this paper, an N (the number of transceivers) by M (the number of active antennas per transceiver) hybrid BF structure is investigated, where the analog BF is performed per transceiver and digital BF is performed across N transceivers. Analysis of the N by M BF structure includes: the optimal analog and digital BF design, EE-SE relationship at the green point (i.e. the point with highest EE) in EE-SE curve, impact of N on EE performance at a given SE value, and impact of N on the green point EE. Numerical simulations are provided to support the analysis.

Energy efficiency optimization for fading MIMO non-orthogonal multiple access systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is expected to be a promising multiple access techniques for 5G networks due to its superior spectral efficiency (SE). In this paper, we study the energy efficiency (EE) optimization for the fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) NOMA systems with statistical channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. The EE optimization problem is formulated to maximize the system EE (defined by ergodic capacity under unit power consumption) under the total transmit power constraint and the minimum rate constraint of the weak user. We propose the near optimal power allocation schemes and also the suboptimal closed-form solutions. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA schemes significantly outperform the traditional orthogonal multiple access scheme with open loop MIMO transmission in terms of both SE and EE.

Joint clustering and inter-cell resource allocation for CoMP in ultra dense cellular networks

Ultra dense cellular networks (UDNs) are concerned in this paper, which employ Macro-Diversity- Coordinated Multipoint (MD-CoMP) to deal with the serious inter-cell interference. Considering the constraints of inter-cell resource allocation posed by CoMP and the difference of load in each cell, a joint clustering and inter-cell resource allocation is necessary. To achieve a feasible solution, the joint optimization is approximated by two sub-problems, i.e. clustering based on load information using game theory and inter-cell resource allocation based graph-coloring algorithms. Thus a two-step joint clustering and scheduling (TS-JCS) scheme is proposed. Simulation results illustrate that TS-JCS has the capability to jointly consider clustering with the requirements on resources. Compared to No-CoMP and the comparing scheme without consideration of resource allocation, TS-JCS can significantly improve the system performance, demonstrating the necessity and superiority of joint CoMP clustering and inter-cell resource allocation.

5G: rethink mobile communications for 2020+.

The 5G network is anticipated to meet the challenging requirements of mobile traffic in the 2020s, which are characterized by super high data rate, low latency, high mobility, high energy efficiency and high traffic density. This paper provides an overview of China Mobile’s 5G vision and potential solutions. Three key characteristics of 5G are analysed, i.e. super fast, soft and green. The main 5G R&D themes are further elaborated, which include five fundamental rethinkings of the traditional design methodologies. The 5G network design considerations are also discussed, with cloud radio access network, ultra-dense network, software defined network and network function virtualization examined as key potential solutions towards a green and soft 5G network. The paradigm shift to user-centric network operation from the traditional cell-centric operation is also investigated, where the decoupled downlink and uplink, control and data, and adaptive multiple connections provide sufficient means to achieve a user-centric 5G network with ‘no more cells’. The software defined air interface is investigated under a uniform framework and can adaptively adapt the parameters to well satisfy various requirements in different 5G scenarios.

Alternating beamforming methods for hybrid analog and digital MIMO transmission

Hybrid beamforming has drawn attention with the increasing concern on high frequency band communication and the appearance of flexible structures of base stations. This paper considers the practical transmitter structure that each antenna is only connected to a unique RF chain and optimizes the analog and digital beamforming matrices to maximize the achievable rate with transmit power constraint. Following alternating optimization principle, closed-form relationships between analog and digital precoders are obtained when both amplitude and phase or only phase can be adjusted to form analog beams. Simulation results demonstrate the advantage of our proposed methods over the existing beam steering method in terms of achievable rate with different scale antenna array. This reveals that the method can be applied to both low and high frequency band communications. When increasing the number of propagation paths, contrast to the traditional beam steering method, the performance of proposed methods becomes better while the complexity almost keeps at an acceptable constant level.

Full duplex: Coming into reality in 2020?

Mobile traffic is projected to increase 1000 times from 2010 to 2020. This poses significant challenges on the 5th generation (5G) wireless communication system design, including network structure, air interface, key transmission schemes, multiple access, and duplexing schemes. In this paper, full duplex (FD) is discussed, aiming to highlight some insights on various issues including deployment scenarios, frame structures, reference signals (RS), interference mitigation, transceiver structures/calibration, and extension of time division duplex (TDD)/frequency division duplex (FDD) to full duplex. It is anticipated that with future standardization and deployment of FD systems, TDD and FDD will be harmoniously integrated, supporting all the existing half duplex mobile phones efficiently, and leading to a much enhanced 5G system performance.