Eliminating Out-Of-Cell Interference in Cellular Massive Mimo with a Single Additional Transceiver

Abstract

Wireless cellular communication networks are bandwidth and interference limited. An important means to overcome these resource limitations is the use of multiple antennas. Base stations equipped with a very large (massive) number of antennas have been the focus of recent research. A bottleneck in such systems is the limited number of transmit/receive chains. In this work, a line-of-sight (LOS) channel model is considered. It is shown that for a given number of interferers, it suffices that the number of transmit/receive chains exceeds the number of desired users by one, assuming a sufficiently large antenna array. From a theoretical point of view, this is the first result proving the near-optimal performance of antenna selection, even when the total number of signals (desired and interfering) is larger than the number of receive chains. Specifically, a single additional chain suffices to reduce the interference to any desired level. We prove that using the proposed selection, a simple linear receiver/transmitter for the uplink/downlink provides near-optimal rates. In particular, in the downlink direction, there is no need for complicated dirty paper coding; each user can use an optimal code for a single user interference-free channel. In the uplink direction, there is almost no gain in implementing joint decoding. The proposed approach is also a significant improvement both from system and computational perspectives. Simulation results demonstrating the performance of the proposed method are provided.