Performance of Limited Feedback MU-MIMO in Distributed Antenna Systems with Different Scheduler

Mehran Behjati, Mahamod Ismail

Dept. of Electrical, Electronic and System Engineering Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor Malaysia {mbehjati, mahamod}@eng.ukm.my

Muhammad@Yusoff Ibrahim
Faculty of Electrical Engineering Universiti Teknologi MARA 40450 Shah Alam, Selangor Malaysia muhdyus@yahoo.com

Abstract Distributed antenna system (DAS) acts as an effective solution to mitigating interference and path-loss by decreasing the access distance for users, and increases the cell coverage and system capacity as well. This study evaluates performance of scheduling methods on the DAS where practical system constraints are considered, such as path-loss, out-of-cell interference and limited feedback. Zero-forcing multiuser MIMO precoding is utilized as downlink transmission strategy, when imperfect channel state information is available at the transmitter. System performance is evaluated by empirical cumulative density functions of the cell throughput, where a longterm evolution advanced (LTE-A) standard compliant simulator is utilized for simulation. It is demonstrated that by spreading the transmit antennas throughout the cell more cell throughput is achievable. Moreover, by utilizing an appropriate scheduling algorithm, more potential of DAS can be extracted and leads to substantial cell throughput. Keywordsdistributed antenna system; limited feedback; zeroforcing precoding; scheduling

diversity can be exploited. Authors of [4] compared the throughput of MU-MIMO zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming with and without DASs, and demonstrated advantages of MUMIMO in DAS, and expressed that by utilizing full MUMIMO to all RRUs best performance in term of area spectral efficiency is achievable. Accordingly, this study applies full MU-MIMO transmission at the central BS and each RRU, as well, according to the LTE-A specifications [5]. Furthermore, system performance evaluated under practical system limitations, such as limited feedback and out-of-cell interference. Recently performance of DASs under perfect and imperfect CSI with different quantization methods investigated in [6]. Authors of [3] showed that DAS can properly mitigate interference, if multiple users scheduled simultaneously. Furthermore, authors of [7] shows that with scheduling multiple best users simultaneously, the system capacity surpasses over scheduling the best user, because inter-user interference mitigated effectively and the spatial degree of freedom can be fully exploited. The results in [7] are only considered for three single antenna RRUs. Therefore, this study investigates the cell throughput in terms of empirical cumulative density functions (ECDF) when different scheduling methods and different configuration of DAS are applied to the MU-MIMO system. In the case of frequency division duplex (FDD) system, channel state information (CSI) should be fed back via user equipments (UEs) to the BS, in order to compute the precoder for inter-user interference cancelation and schedule users and set a suitable modulation and coding scheme (MCS). To save uplink resource, at the receiver side, the achieved CSI is quantized by random channel direction quantization (RCDQ) method [8] and conveyed to the BS by limited bits. Afterwards, at the transmitter side, ZF beamforming [9] as a promising transmission strategy is utilized to exploit multiplexing gain and mitigate interference. The simulation results demonstrate that, by utilizing proper scheduler method the potential of DAS can be extracted and with increasing the number of RRUs and transmit antenna per RRU more cell throughput can be achieved.

I.

INTRODUCTION

In cellular networks, interference is known as a major destructive factor to provide uniform high data-rate throughout the coverage area. A partial solution to this problem is reducing the overall transmit power by utilizing distributed antenna system (DAS). Moreover, DAS enhances the coverage area, capacity, and throughput, especially in shadowed and blind environments [1], [2]. To do so, remote radio units (RRUs) are distributed over the cell area and are connected to the central base station (BS) via low-latency and high-bandwidth dedicated connections acting as distributed antenna arrays (DAAs). DAS reduces the access distance for users, whereby reduces the required uplink transmission power and achieves significant transmission power gain, moreover increases the sum-rate capacity versus conventional cellular system [3], [1]. Results in [2] show that DAS reduces inter-cell interference and significantly improves capacity, specially for users are located close to the cell edges. By applying multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) transmission to the DAS, more spatial multiuser

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II outlines the system model of limited feedback MU-MIMO, which contains downlink transmission, CSI feedback, precoding, and scheduling. Simulation methodology is illustrated in Section III. Section IV presents the simulation results. Finally Section V summarizes and concludes the paper. II. LIMITED FEEDBACK MU-MIMO SYSTEM MODEL

A. MU-MIMO Downlink Channel Figure 1 depicts the architecture of considered MU-MIMO DAS with I cells which each cell i = {1, , I} contains one central BS with Mc,i transmit antennas and R i RRUs which each of them equipped with Mr,i , where r{1, , R i }. The total number of users which served in cell i is K i and each user k{1, , K i } is equipped with Nk,i receive antennas. The inputoutput relationship on kth user in cell i is given by
i I yk,i = Hk,i xk,i + Hk,i u=1 ,uk x u,i + j=0,ji Hk,i Xj + nk,i

Fig. 1. MU-MIMO DAS architecture

(j)

them in order to reduce the feedback overhead. In cellular networks, CSI is divided into two categories: 1) Channel quality indicator (CQI): There is an unusual problem to calculate the CQI in the receiver side, when calculation of CQI depends to the scheduler ahead of transmission, and scheduler computation depends to the CQI feedback. Therefore, to solve this problem, scheduler can make decision based on the expected SINR value (not on the exact SINR value). As a preliminary solution, it can be assumed that there is no quantization error in the CDI feedback, therefore SINR k,i pk,i ||hk,i ||2 cos 2 k,i = k,i
(1)

(1)

where, , is the perturbed received signal vector to user in ( ) cell , , , is the channel matrix between user in cell and all transmit antennas of cell ( = , + =1 , ), for simplicity whenever = , the superscript () 2 . ) is additive white omitted, , = , . , ~ ( , 2 Gaussian noise (AWGN) with variance , and ( , ) is the scheduled and precoded symbol vector , ~ as follows xk,i = fk,i sk,i (2)

(4)

As a better approximation, authors of [10] proposed a lowerbound of SINR as CQI, as

P |h |2 cos2 k,i Mi k,i P 1+ |hk,i |2 sin2 k,i Mi

In the receiver side users apply a linear receiver filters, wk,i Nk,i1 , to quantize their respective channels. Consequently the symbol of kth user can be estimated by applying wk to the perturbed receive vector yk,i , as
H H H i s k,i = wk ,i yk,i = wk,i Hk,i fk,i sk,i + wk,i Hk,i u=1,uk fk,i sk,i + ( ) j H I (3) wk ,i j=0,ji Hk,i Fj Sj + nk, K

where {1, , K i } is the set of selected users that are served in parallel over a given time-frequency resource in cell i, sk,i (O, PTx D) is the selected users symbols which independently generated by channel encoders with statistical 2 power sk,i = 1, and fk,i is the precoder vector which maps the transmit symbol vector onto the Mi transmit antennas, and allocates the available transmit power P among users.

Xj =

k ,jI\i

fk,j sk,j = Fj Sj

quantized channel direction. Therefore CQI feedback provided by CQIk = (k ) (6)

where , is the angle between effective channel direction and

SINR k,i

= k,i

(2)

(5)

B. Channel State Information Feedback In the MU-MIMO FDD systems, transmitter requires CSI, to compute the precoding matrix, schedule users and select an appropriate MCS for downlink transmission. As channel matrix contain multi-dimensional variable, UEs should to exploit beneficial characteristics of their channels and quantize

To select an appropriate MCS, a look-up table is used as defined in [11]. Moreover, to decrease the quantization error, and reduce the feedback overhead, as well, a combination of quantized CQI feedback with hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol [12] is utilized at the simulator. 2) Channel direction indicator (CDI): The effective channel vector , which is a concatenated of channel matrix and the receive filter (, = , , ) contains essential channel statistics for interference mitigation. Therefore, users , = computes their effective channel directions as

where is quantization function.

, ||, || and in order to save the uplink bandwidth, with utilizing , to a unit norm vector quantize the quantization codebook. The simplest way to design a codebook is randomly generate the 2 quantization codewords from an isotropic distribution on the M-dimensional unit sphere, which results to a lower complexity. Therefore, the CDI is given by k k = h CDI: h (7)

TABLE I.

SIMULATION PARAMETERS Value 43 dBm -174 dBm/Hz 8 dB 2.1 GHz 1.4 MHz 15 kHz Correlated Flat Rayleigh 8 1 500 m 3 Km/h QPSK (code rate=0.076, 0.117, 0.188, 0.301, 0.439, 0.588) 16QAM (code rate=0.369, 0.479, 0.602) 64QAM (code rate=0.455, 0.553, 0.650, 0.754, 0.853, 0.926) MMSE

where is the effective channel quantization function. In this study, the RCDQ method defined in [8] is used for quantization purpose. C. Zero Forcing Precoding In this study ZF beamforming is utilized as multi-user transmission strategy, when BS selects a large number of users ( ) and sends one data stream to each of them. Precoding matrix is computed based on the quantized effective , to exploit multiplexing gain and mitigate channel direction interference. Therefore, precoding vector , should be selected in a way to be orthogonal to the quantized effective , ( \ {}), thus , = channel vectors of other users , 0. Therefore, the ZF beamforming matrix can be computed as D. Scheduling CQI feedback provides information such as channel amplitude and quantization error for transmitter, whereby BS selects a subset of users and assigns the available resource to them for downlink transmission. In ZF MU-MIMO precoding transmission when the total number of receive antennas exceeds the total number of transmit antennas, a scheduling algorithm is vital to select a subset of orthogonal users to serve in parallel over a given time-frequency resource. Authors of [10] proposed a greedy user selection algorithm, where transmitter uses the available SINR value and searches through the unscheduled users to select users which can maximize sum-rate, where sum-rate defined as ( ) = ki log 2 (1 + ki ) = arg max ki K
K k Tk
i

Parameters Terminal power Noise power spectral density Shadowing standard deviation Carrier frequency Channel bandwidth Subcarrier bandwidth Channel model Number of transmit antennas Number of UEs receive antennas Cell radius UE speed

Available MCSs

equalizer filter

PU2RC outperforms the zero-forcing beamforming scheme, and it is more robust against CSI quantization errors. III. METHODOLOGY

jH (H jH jH )1 diag(pj )12 F=H

(8)

(9)

System-level simulation of MU-MIMO requires detailed knowledge of physical layer and results to massive computational complexity. Therefore, Vienna simulator uses the hybrid link/system level simulations to consider the physical details of one cell and out-of-cell interference as well (see [6] for out-of-cell interference model). The system performance evaluated under limited feedback methods which described in Section II, where eight bits assigned for CSI feedback. The performance of system evaluated under different scheduling method as illustrated in table II. Finally, simulation results are presented as empirical CDFs of the average cell throughput. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this study, to simulate the results the Vienna LTE-A link-level simulator [15] is used which is compliant to the LTE-A specifications. In order to simulate the results of DAS, all users are randomly distributed in one central cell which is surrounded with two interfering base stations tiers. Central cell is equipped with one central BS and some uniformly distributed antenna arrays which located equiangularly on a ring with radius of (23) . The simulation parameters are listed in Table I.

Therefore, set of selected users is according to (10)

where ki is the current achievable sum-rate and Tki is the average past sum-rate of this user. (for original definition see algorithm 2 in [10]). As an alternative method, per user unitary and rate control (PU2RC) scheme has been proposed to 3GPP [13], where user scheduling and beamforming are jointly and practically designed. PU2RC supports limited feedback MU-MIMO system and it capable to exploit multiuser diversity. [14] showed that in presence of large enough number of users,

The simulation results obtained for DASs with different DAS configurations and different scheduling methods. DAS configurations are denoted as Mc,i R i /Mr,i . To evaluate the performance of scheduling methods in DASs, simulations are performed in two scenarios: with and without DAAs, means that R i {2,4,6}, and R i = 0, respectively. Figure 2 presents the empirical CDFs of cell throughput under considerations. The results of PU2RC scheduler are showed in Figure 2 (a), and illustrate that by increasing the number of RRU, the cell throughput increases as well. Figure 2 (b) presents the results

Cell throughput with 0.95 ECDF

TABLE II. Model PU2RC ZF-MUMIMO ZF-MUMIMO-flat

SCHEDULING METHODS

14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 8-0/0 4-2/2 4-4/1 DAS configuration 2-6/1

Notes Proposed by [13] to the 3GPP-LTE standards (1) Proposed by [10], k,i placements in (9) Proposed by [10],
(2) k,i

PU2RC ZF-MUMIMO ZF-MUMIMO-flat

placements in (9)

ECDF of cell throughput

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 1 1.5 2

(a)

8-0/0 4-2/2 4-4/1 2-6/1

2.5 3 3.5

Fig. 3. Comparision of performance of schedulers in different DAS configurations, in term of 0.95 of ECDF

Cell throughput [Mbit/s]

ECDF of cell throughput

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0 2 4

(b)

8-0/0 4-2/2 4-4/1 2-6/1

6 8 10

Cell throughput [Mbit/s]

Figure 2(c) belong to ZF-MUMIMO-flat scheduler and reveal a remarkable dependency to the DASs. The performance of schedulers under different DAS configurations is compared in Figure 3. As results show, when all transmit antennas are allocated on the central BS (8-0/0 configuration), the lowest cell throughput is achieved. It that case, ZF-MUMIMO-flat provides better performance, because more accurate and sufficient knowledge of SINR fed back to the BS compared to ZF-MIMO scheme, and under small number of users, performance of PU2RC is not sufficient (see [14]). PU2RC performs a weak dependency to the DAS configuration, where cell throughput slowly improves with RRU increment. While, ZF-MUMIMO-flat scheduler goodly extracts the potential of DASs, where for 2-6/1 configuration approximately achieves four folds more cell throughput compared to 8-0/0 configuration. V. CONCLUSION

ECDF of cell throughput

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0 2 4 6

(c)

8-0/0 4-2/2 4-4/1 2-6/1

8 10 12 14

Cell throughput [Mbit/s]

This study investigates the performance of different scheduling methods in distributed antenna systems with limited feedback zero-forcing multiuser MIMO transmission. Simulation results show that by spreading the transmit antennas throughout the cell more cell throughput is achievable, moreover by assigning more transmit antenna per RRU, more multiplexing gain can be extracted. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that PU2RC scheme as a well-known precoding and scheduling method has a poor dependency to the DASs. The comparison of results shows that by utilizing an appropriate user selection strategy substantial cell throughput can be achieved. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The study was funded by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and and Universiti Teknologi MARA under grants number DPP2013-006 and 600-RMI/Dana 5/3/RIF(285/2012) respectively. REFERENCES
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Fig. 2. Cell throughput performance in therm of ECDF, with different DAS configuration and scheduling methods: (a) PU2RC, (b) ZFMUMIMO, and (c) ZF-MUMIMO-flat

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