Multiple Antenna Communications

Aim

After passing the course, the student should

• be able to describe and discuss the fundamental limitations when using the wireless medium for communications; in particular, the relations between channel capacity, channel coherence, spatial degrees of freedom, transmission power, pilot contamination, and bandwidth
• be able to identify and describe how multiple antenna techniques are used to achieve high capacity in point‐to‐point as well as multi‐user communications
• with some precision be able to solve engineering oriented problems regarding the achievable performance and limits of multiple antenna communications
• be able to utilize power control and other parameters to design communication systems that meet given service quality requirements
• experimentally validate the main theoretic multiple antenna concepts.

Content

Fundamental limits: Capacity behavior as power or bandwidth increases. Examples of practical systems that are power and bandwidth limited. Orthogonal versus non-orthogonal transmission in scenarios with multiple users. Basic multiple antenna channels: Array gain, capacity of channels with multiple antennas at one side. Modeling of multi‐antenna channel responses. Fading channels: Rayleigh fading channels, outage capacity, diversity, channel coherence, ergodic capacity. Point‐to‐point MIMO: Capacity of channels with multiple antennas at both sides, multiplexing gain, spatial degrees of freedom. Uplink multi‐user MIMO: Uplink capacity, non‐linear and linear detection, channel estimation, capacity bounds in systems with many antennas. Downlink multi‐user MIMO: Linear precoding, capacity bounds in systems with many antennas, differences and similarities between uplink and downlink. Power control: Rate region, typical operating points, basic power allocation formulations. Cellular networks: Engineering aspects of applying multiple antenna techniques in cellular networks, including reuse strategies, pilot contamination, and interference management. The purpose of the laboratory work is to become familiar with the zero‐forcing processing concept, to implement such a technique, and to evaluate its behaviors experimentally.