An overview of transmission theory and techniques of large-scale antenna systems for 5G wireless communications

Science China Information Sciences volume 59, Article number: 081301 (2016) Cite this article

Abstract

To meet the future demand for huge traffic volume of wireless data service, the research on the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication systems has been undertaken in recent years. It is expected that the spectral and energy efficiencies in 5G mobile communication systems should be ten-fold higher than the ones in the fourth generation (4G) mobile communication systems. Therefore, it is important to further exploit the potential of spatial multiplexing of multiple antennas. In the last twenty years, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna techniques have been considered as the key techniques to increase the capacity of wireless communication systems. When a large-scale antenna array (which is also called massive MIMO) is equipped in a base-station, or a large number of distributed antennas (which is also called large-scale distributed MIMO) are deployed, the spectral and energy efficiencies can be further improved by using spatial domain multiple access. This paper provides an overview of massive MIMO and large-scale distributed MIMO systems, including spectral efficiency analysis, channel state information (CSI) acquisition, wireless transmission technology, and resource allocation.

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Affiliations

  1. National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Dongming Wang, Yu Zhang, Hao Wei, Xiaohu You & Xiqi Gao

  2. School of Engineering and Digital Arts, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT27NT, UK

    Jiangzhou Wang

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  1. Dongming Wang
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Correspondence to Xiaohu You.

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Wang, D., Zhang, Y., Wei, H. et al. An overview of transmission theory and techniques of large-scale antenna systems for 5G wireless communications. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 59, 081301 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-016-0278-5

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Keywords

  • the fifth generation mobile communication
  • massive MIMO
  • large-scale distributed antenna systems
  • spectral efficiency
  • channel state information acquisition
  • multi-user MIMO
  • resource allocation