Prospective Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G

By Jiayi Zhang, Emil Björnson, Michail Matthaiou, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Hong Yang, D. J. Love. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2019

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Multiple antenna technologies have attracted much research interest for several decades and have gradually made their way into mainstream communication systems. Two main benefits are adaptive beamforming gains and spatial multiplexing, leading to high data rates per user and per cell, especially when large antenna arrays are adopted. Since multiple antenna technology has become a key component of the fifth-generation (5G) networks, it is time for the research community to look for new multiple antenna technologies to meet the immensely higher data rate, reliability, and traffic demands in the beyond 5G era. Radically new approaches are required to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in these metrics. There will be large technical challenges, many of which are yet to be identified. In this paper, we survey three new multiple antenna technologies that can play key roles in beyond 5G networks: cell-free massive MIMO, beamspace massive MIMO, and intelligent reflecting surfaces. For each of these technologies, we present the fundamental motivation, key characteristics, recent technical progresses, and provide our perspectives for future research directions. The paper is not meant to be a survey/tutorial of a mature subject, but rather serve as a catalyst to encourage more research and experiments in these multiple antenna technologies.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/669059b492a7ac2f96c06edad1f73e60cb58ad21

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Citations in the corpus

Communicating With Extremely Large-Scale Array/Surface: Unified Modeling and Performance Analysis (2021, neutral): “) of beyond 5G (B5G) or sixth-generation (6G) communication networks [2]–[5].”
A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, background): “Unfortunately, despite the development of advanced wireless communication techniques, e.g., massive MIMO [149]–[152], mmWave transmission [153]–[155], and full-duplex communication [156]–[158], it is believed that a single wireless link between a user and a terrestrial BS cannot satisfy URLLC…”
Edge Artificial Intelligence for 6G: Vision, Enabling Technologies, and Applications (2021, background): “The recent proposal of cell-free massive MIMO [201] serves a promising way to realize the wireless distributed FL systems by exploiting the channel hardening characterization (i.e., the effective channel gain is approximated by its expectation value) and avoiding sharing instantaneous CSI among…”
5G Key Technologies for Smart Railways (2020, methodology): “Although massive MIMO has been used for 5G networks operating in conventional sub-6 GHz bands, it still presents many research challenges [14].”
User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks: A Survey of Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions (2021, background): “The second mode is non-coherent transmission, where the DUs transmit different data streams to the user, and each transmitter precodes the data independently allowing only a power gain at the receiver [40].”
A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, methodology): “In the meantime, with massive MIMO successfully implemented in 5G [15,16],”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided MIMO Broadcasting for Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (2019, background): “RECENTLY, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless communication has received considerable research attention, since it is capable of supporting costeffective and energy-efficient high data rate communication for next-generation communication systems [1]–[3].”
A Comprehensive Survey on Millimeter Wave Communications for Fifth-Generation Wireless Networks: Feasibility and Challenges (2020, background): “…networks are suboptimal as higher spectral efﬁciency (bit/s/Hz/UE) can be realized by employing multiple access points per signal co-processing [312], [313], [316]. correlation [316], and therefore, proper user grouping and user scheduling algorithms are required to reduce UEs’ spatial…”
Off-grid Channel Estimation with Sparse Bayesian Learning for OTFS Systems (2021, background): “The extension to multiple-input multiple-output OTFS systems [19] will be considered in our future work.”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, background): “Thus, thanks to the short wavelength of mmWave signals and the rapid development of antenna and UAV manufacturing technologies, nowadays massive numbers of antenna elements as well as high-gain antennas can be deployed in a relatively limited space on a UAV [101].”
Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO (2020, background): “A cell-free network is an attempt to move beyond those limits [49], [83], [126], [208], [210].”
A Tutorial on Near-Field XL-MIMO Communications Toward 6G (2023, neutral): “…and was recognized as the essential transmission technology, where the 4G long-term evolution (LTE) advanced network supported up to 8 × 8 MIMO. massive Hitherto, MIMO technology had evolved to MIMO in 5G, whose typical conﬁguration at the base station (BS) is 64 antenna elements [8], [20].”
Joint Active and Passive Beamforming Optimization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted SWIPT Under QoS Constraints (2019, neutral): “, millimeter wave and terahertz) frequencies [3]–[5].”
A Tutorial on Extremely Large-Scale MIMO for 6G: Fundamentals, Signal Processing, and Applications (2023, background): “Compared with cellular mMIMO, the concept of cell boundary has been removed in CF mMIMO systems, where a large number of distributed access points (APs) are deployed in a wide area to serve the user equipment (UE) by joint transmission and reception [38]–[44].”
Beam Focusing for Near-Field Multi-User MIMO Communications (2021, background): “In order to compensate for the dominant path loss characterizing transmissions in high frequencies, wireless base stations (BSs) operating in these bands will be equipped with electrically large antenna arrays [2].”
Bayesian Predictive Beamforming for Vehicular Networks: A Low-Overhead Joint Radar-Communication Approach (2020, neutral): “To analyze the probability of beam misalignment, we use Δ = 2δ to denote the beamwidth and beams are aligned only if the vehicle’s beam direction θ n+1 satisfying |θV n+1 − θn+1| ≤ δ and the RSU’s beam direction θ n+1 satisfying |θR n+1 − θn+1| ≤ δ, where θn+1 denotes the actual angle of the vehicle”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Terahertz Communications (2020, background): “For example, in a cell-free massive MIMO scenario [307], distributed access points can each provide an excess of 100 GHz to a user, especially under low mobility.”