Advanced Hybrid Analog-Digital Massive MIMO Techniques for Millimeter Wave Wireless Systems (AdAMMM)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Martin Haardt, since 2/2019
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 402834619

Compared to the scarce radio resources under 6 GHz, large available portions of spectrum at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies have a great potential to satisfy versatile and critical demands of next generation wireless communication systems. However, mmWave signals suffer an orders-of-magnitude larger path loss and have a higher probability of blockage due to the pencil-like beamwidth. These drawbacks can be compensated by using a large number of antennas at the transmitter and/or at the receiver, i.e., by using massive MIMO. One of the practical massive MIMO architectures, which is cost and energy efficient, is a hybrid analog-digital MIMO architecture. It can benefit from the use of both analog and digital processing. The analog parts are often realized using phase shift networks. This new hardware architecture imposes new constraints on MIMO processing algorithms and introduces novel signal processing challenges. Therefore, advanced hybrid analog-digital massive MIMO algorithms, which tackle these new challenges, will be a key enabler of mmWave wireless communications.The aim of this project is to study and to evaluate the potential of hybrid analog-digital massive MIMO techniques for future wideband mmWave wireless communications. Various aspects of hybrid MIMO aided mmWave wireless communications will be investigated and evaluated. This will be achieved by developing efficient hybrid MIMO precoding and decoding algorithms as well as channel estimation algorithms, and by deriving the corresponding information theoretic results. We will study the point-to-point scenario, multi-user MIMO scenarios and multi-user multi-cell scenarios taking into account time-varying or time-invariant frequency-selective channel models. To improve the coverage, hybrid MIMO two-way relaying techniques will be developed. The performance of hybrid MIMO architectures will also be compared to the competing massive MIMO architecture based on 1-bit analog-to-digital converters.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr.-Ing. Jianshu Zhang, until 1/2019