Performance Analysis Of Massive MIMO With Port Reduction

Abstract: In centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture, the base-band unit (BBU) is connected to one or more remote radio units (RRUs) via a fronthaul (FH) interface. Upgrading base station antennas in C-RAN to support massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology can improve network spectral efficiency and largely boost the capacity of the 5G system. Those great benefits also introduce new challenges to the FH interface since the required FH capacity increases proportionally to the number of transceiver units (TXRUs) for traditional receiver processing at the BBU. To reduce the FH link load, different base-band splitting options between RRUs and BBU are considered in practical C-RAN networks. In this project, we investigate three beamforming algorithms (MRC, DFT and Enhanced) which are expected to reduce the number of streams on FH link, and evaluate their performance for single-user MIMO in different mobility scenarios via system-level simulations. The results show that we successfully reach the goal of reducing the number of streams to one-fourth the number of TXRUs meanwhile maintaining relatively good performance. Additionally, we observe that the Enhanced algorithm performs the best in majority of scenarios.