Wireless communications are important in our highly connected world. The amount of data being transferred in cellular networks is steadily growing, and consequently more capacity is needed. This thesis considers the problem of downlink capacity improvement from the perspective of multicell coordination. By employing multiple antennas at the transmitters and receivers of a multicell network, the inherent spatial selectivity of the users can be exploited in order to increase the capacity through linear precoding and receive filtering. For the coordination between cells, distributed algorithms are often sought due to their low implementation complexity and robustness. In this context, the thesis considers two problem domains: base station clustering and coordinated precoding. Base station clustering corresponds to grouping the cell base stations into disjoint clusters in order to reduce the coordination overhead. This is needed in intermediate-sized to large networks, where the ...

In this thesis, we consider a multiuser system with a transmitter equipped with multiple antennas and only one antenna at each receiver user. This system, which is termed MUMISO (Multi User Multiple Input/Single Output), is of use to model the downlink of a wireless communication system, where multiple antennas at the base station transmit to several users with usually only one antenna at each receiving unit. This downlink channel is also called Broadcast Channel (BC). When considering this broadcast channel, the centralized transmitter clearly has more degrees of freedom than each of the receivers. Therefore, it is appropriate to separate the signals by applying precoding at the transmitter. To be able to design precoding, the transmitter needs knowledge about the channel states of the different receivers. In the case of Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) systems, this knowledge can be obtained ...

The envisioned rapid and exponential increase of wireless data traffic demand in the next years imposes rethinking current wireless cellular networks due to the scarcity of the available spectrum. In this regard, three main drivers are considered to increase the capacity of today's most advanced (4G systems) and future (5G systems and beyond) cellular networks: i) use more bandwidth (more Hz) through spectral aggregation, ii) enhance the spectral efficiency per base station (BS) (more bits/s/Hz/BS) by using multiple antennas at BSs and users (i.e. MIMO systems), and iii) increase the density of BSs (more BSs/km2) through a dense and heterogeneous deployment (known as dense heterogeneous cellular networks). We focus on the last two drivers. First, the use of multi-antenna systems allows exploiting the spatial dimension for several purposes: improving the capacity of a conventional point-to-point wireless link, increasing the number ...

This work considers a Broadcast Channel (BC) system, where the transmitter is equipped with multiple antennas and each user at the receiver side could have one or more antennas. Depending on the number of antennas at the receiver side, such a system is known as Multiple-User Multiple-Input Single-Output (MU-MISO), for single antenna users, or Multiple-UserMultiple-InputMultiple-Output (MU-MIMO), for several antenna users. This model is suitable for current wireless communication systems. Regarding the direction of the data flow, we differentiate between downlink channel or BC, and uplink channel or Multiple Access Channel (MAC). In the BC the signals are sent from the Base Station (BS) to the users, whereas the information from the users is sent to the BS in the MAC. In this work we focus on the BC where the BS applies linear precoding taking advantage of multiple antennas. The ...

The use of multiple antennas at base stations and user devices is a key component in the design of cellular communication systems that can meet the capacity demands of tomorrow. The downlink transmission from base stations to users is particularly limiting, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective, since user devices should be simple and power-efficient, and because many applications primarily create downlink traffic (e.g., video streaming). The potential gain of employing multiple antennas for downlink transmission is well recognized: the total data throughput increases linearly with the number of transmit antennas if the spatial dimension is exploited for simultaneous transmission to multiple users. In the design of practical cellular systems, the actual benefit of multiuser multiantenna transmission is limited by a variety of factors, including acquisition and accuracy of channel information, transmit power, channel conditions, cell density, user ...

Feedback in wireless communications is tied to a long-standing and successful history, facilitating robust and spectrally efficient transmission over the uncertain wireless medium. Since the application of multiple antennas at both ends of the communication link, enabling multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, the importance of feedback information to achieve the highest performance is even more pronounced. Especially when multiple antennas are employed by the transmitter to handle the interference between multiple users, channel state information (CSI) is a fundamental prerequisite. The corresponding multi-user MIMO, interference alignment and coordination techniques are considered as a central part of future cellular networks to cope with the growing inter-cell-interference, caused by the unavoidable densification of base stations to support the exponentially increasing demand on network capacities. However, this vision can only be implemented with efficient feedback algorithms that provide accurate CSI at the transmitter without ...

In order to meet ever-growing needs for capacity in wireless networks, transmission techniques and the system models used to study their performances have rapidly evolved. From single-user single-antenna point-to-point communications to modern multi-cell multi-antenna cellular networks there have been large advances in technology. Along the way, several assumptions are made in order to have either more realistic models, but also to allow simpler analysis. We analyze three aspects of actual networks and try to benefit from them when possible or conversely, to mitigate their negative impact. This sometimes corrects overly optimistic results, for instance when delay in the channel state information (CSI) acquisition is no longer neglected. However, this sometimes also corrects overly pessimistic results, for instance when in a broadcast channel (BC) the number of users is no longer limited to be equal to the number of transmit antennas ...

Multi-antenna processing is widely adopted as one of the key enabling technologies for current and future cellular networks. Particularly, multiuser downlink beamforming (also known as space-division multiple access), in which multiple users are simultaneously served with spatial transmit beams in the same time and frequency resource, achieves high spectral efficiency with reduced energy consumption. To harvest the potential of multiuser downlink beamforming in practical systems, optimal beamformer design shall be carried out jointly with network resource allocation. Due to the specifications of cellular standards and/or implementation constraints, resource allocation in practice naturally necessitates discrete decision makings, e.g., base station (BS) association, user scheduling and admission control, adaptive modulation and coding, and codebook-based beamforming (precoding). This dissertation focuses on the joint optimization of multiuser downlink beamforming and discrete resource allocation in modern cellular networks. The problems studied in this thesis involve ...

The thriving development of wireless communications calls for innovative and advanced signal processing techniques targeting at an enhanced performance in terms of reliability, throughput, robustness, efficiency, flexibility, etc.. This thesis addresses such a compelling demand and presents new and intriguing progress towards fulfilling it. We mainly concentrate on two advanced multi-dimensional signal processing challenges for wireless systems that have attracted tremendous research attention in recent years, multi-carrier Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems and multi-dimensional harmonic retrieval. As the key technologies of wireless communications, the numerous benefits of MIMO and multi-carrier modulation, e.g., boosting the data rate and improving the link reliability, have long been identified and have ignited great research interest. In particular, the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based multi-user MIMO downlink with Space-Division Multiple Access (SDMA) combines the twofold advantages of MIMO and multi-carrier modulation. It is the essential element ...

In the last decades the world has experienced a massive growth in the demand for wireless services. The recent popularity of hand-held devices with data exchange capabilities over wireless networks, such as smartphones and tablets, increased the wireless data traffic even further. This trend is not expected to cease in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is expected to accelerate as everyday apparatus unrelated with data communications, such as vehicles or household devices, are foreseen to be equipped with wireless communication capabilities. Further, the next generation wireless networks should be designed such that they have increased spectral and energy efficiency, provide uniformly good service to all of the accommodated users and handle many more devices simultaneously. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) systems, also termed as large-scale MIMO, very large MIMO or full-dimension MIMO, have recently been proposed as a candidate ...

The number of mobile devices and the amount of traffic generated by them has grown at a tremendous pace in the last years and it is expected to continue growing. This growth contrasts with the limited bandwidth that needs to be shared among users. Network densification has been proposed as a promising technique to satisfy the previous demands over a shared bandwidth. This is realized by increasing the density of base stations deployed. Although network densification can improve the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the users located close to the serving base station, it can also increase the inter-cell interference received by other users. In current cellular networks, base stations deal with inter-cell interference by splitting the bandwidth in two parts. The first one is assigned to users with low interference (typically in the cell center) and it is reused in ...

In the last few years, wireless devices have evolved to unimaginable heights. Current forecasts suggest that, in the near future, every device that may take advantage of a wireless connection will have one. In addition, there is a gradual migration to smart devices and high-speed connections, and, as a consequence, the overall mobile traffic is expected to experience a tremendous growth in the next years. The multiuser interference will hence become the main limiting factor and the most critical point to address. As instrumental to efficiently manage interference between different systems, this thesis provides a thorough study on cooperative techniques. That is, users share information and exploit it to improve the overall performance. Since multiuser cooperation represents a very broad term, we will focus on algorithm design and transceiver optimization for three cooperative scenarios that capture some of the main ...

Code division multiple access (CDMA) techniques have been widely employed by different wireless systems with many advantages. However, the performance of these systems is limited by interference. A number of different interference suppression techniques have been proposed, including multiuser detection, beamforming, adaptive supervised and blind algorithms, and transmit processing techniques requiring a limited feedback channel. Recently, CDMA techniques have also been combined with multicarrier and multiantenna schemes to further increase the system capacity and performance. This thesis investigates the existing algorithms and structures and proposes novel interference suppression algorithms for spread spectrum systems. Firstly we investigate blind constrained constant modulus (CCM) stochastic gradient (SG) receivers with a low-complexity variable step-size mechanism for downlink direct sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA) systems. This algorithm provides better performance than existing blind schemes in non-stationary scenarios. Convergence and tracking analyses of the proposed adaptation techniques are ...

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems will be applied in wireless communications in order to increase the performance, spectral efficiency, and reliability. Theoretically, the channel capacity of those systems grows linearly with the number of transmit and receive antennas. An important performance metric beneath capacity is the normalised mean square error (MSE) under the assumption of optimal linear reception. Clearly, both performance measures depend on the properties of the MIMO channel as well as on the considered system approach, e.g. on the type of channel state information which is available at the transmitter. It has been shown that even partial CSI at the transmitter can increase the performance. In this thesis, we analyse the performance and design optimal transmit strategies of singleand multiuser MIMO systems with respect to the statistical properties of the fading channel and under different types of CSI at ...

Signal processing techniques for multiple-antenna transmission can exploit the spatial dimension of the wireless channel to serve multiple users simultaneously, achieving high spectral efficiencies. Realizing such gains; however, is strongly dependent on the availability of highly accurate and up-to-date Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT). This stems from the necessity to deal with multiuser interference through preprocessing; as receivers cannot coordinate in general. In wireless systems, CSIT is subject to uncertainty due to estimation and quantization errors, delays and mismatches. This thesis proposes optimized preprocessing techniques for broadcasting scenarios where a multi-antenna transmitter communicates with single-antenna receivers under CSIT uncertainties. First, we consider a scenario where the transmitter communicates an independent message to each receiver. The most popular preprocessing techniques in this setup are based on linear precoding (or beamforming). Despite their near-optimum rate performances when highly accurate CSIT ...