Hours:
16 hours (4 credits)

Room:
July 10: Aula Riunioni del Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Piano 6, Largo Lucio Lazzarino 1, Pisa
July 12, 14, 17: Aula Riunioni del Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, via G. Caruso 16, Pisa – Ground Floor

Short Abstract:
The next generation wireless networks need to accommodate around 1000x higher data volumes and 50x more devices than current networks. Since the spectral resources are scarce, particularly in bands suitable for wide-area coverage, the main improvements need to come from a more aggressive spatial reuse of the spectrum; that is, many more concurrent transmissions are required per unit area. This can be achieved by the Massive MIMO (massive multi-user multiple-input multiple output) technology, where the access points are equipped with hundreds of antennas and can serve tens of users on each time-frequency resource by spatial multiplexing. The large number of antennas provides a great separation of users in the spatial domain, which is a paradigm shift from conventional multi-user technologies that mainly rely on user separation in the time or frequency domains.

In recent years, massive MIMO has gone from being a mind-blowing theoretical concept to one of the most promising 5G-enabling technologies. Everybody seems to talk about massive MIMO, but do they all mean the same thing? What is the canonical definition of massive MIMO? What are the main differences from the classical multi-user MIMO technology from the nineties? What are the key characteristics of the transmission protocol? How can massive MIMO be deployed? Is pilot contamination an actual problem? Are there any widespread misunderstandings?

These lectures build upon our recent book:

E. Bjornson, J. Hoydis, L. Sanguinetti
"Massive MIMO Networks: Spectral, Energy, and Hardware Efficiency"
Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing (under review)

which provide answers to all of the above questions and aims at giving a clear and balanced picture of the fundamentals of Massive MIMO, as well as an up-to-date survey of the state-of-the-art results in the main areas of spectral efficiency for spatially correlated channels, channel modeling, array deployments, energy efficiency.

Course Contents in brief:

• Massive MIMO: Motivation and Introduction
  • Introduction: Trends and 5G goals
  • Evolving cellular networks for higher area throughput
  • Key aspects of having massive antenna numbers
  • Achieving a scalable Massive MIMO protocol
• Spectral efficiency
  • Basic communication theoretical results
  • Methodology for performance evaluation
  • Channel estimation
  • Spectral efficiency in uplink and downlink
  • The limiting factors of Massive MIMO
• Asymptotic analysis
  • Linearly independent and orthogonal covariance matrices
  • Asymptotic Insights
  • The unlimited capacity of Massive MIMO
  • Acquiring covariance matrices
• Practical deployment considerations
  • Power allocation
  • Spatial resource allocation
  • Array deployments – different antenna geometries, effect of antenna element spacing
  • Massive MIMO at mmWave frequencies
  • Co-existence with heterogeneous networks
• Energy efficiency
  • Why care about energy efficiency?
  • Transmit power – asymptotic insights
  • Mathematical definition of energy efficiency
  • Importance of accurate power consumption modeling
  • Energy Efficiency and Throughput Tradeoff
  • Network Design for Maximal Energy Efficiency

Schedule:

• July 10: 9am-1pm
• July 12: 9am-1pm
• July 14: 9am-1pm
• July 17: 9am-1pm