An Overview of MIMO Wireless communication

Introduction
Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology has been widely studied during the last two decades and applied to
many wireless standards since it can significantly improve the capacity and reliability of wireless systems. While initial work
on the problem focused on point-to-point MIMO links where two devices with multiple antennas communicate with each
other, focus has shifted in recent years to more practical multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems.

Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems, where typically a base station (BS) with multiple antennas simultaneously
serves a set of single-antenna users and the multiplexing gain can be shared by all users. In this way, expensive equipment is
only needed on the BS end of the link, and the user terminals can be relatively cheap single-antenna devices. Furthermore,
due to multi-user diversity, the performance of MU-MIMO systems is generally less sensitive to the propagation environment
than in the point-to-point MIMO case. As a result, MU-MIMO has become an integral part of communications standards,
such as 802.11 (WiFi), 802.16 (WiMAX), LTE, and is progressively being deployed throughout the world. For most MIMO
implementations, the BS typically employs only a few (i.e., fewer than 10) antennas, and the corresponding improvement in
spectral efficiency, while important, is still relatively modest.

In a recent effort to achieve more dramatic gains as well as to simplify the required signal processing, massive MIMO
systems or large-scale antenna systems (LSAS) have been proposed in , where each BS is equipped with orders of magnitude
more antennas, e.g., 100 or more. A massive MU-MIMO network is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Illustration of Massive MU-MIMO systems.

Another advantage of massive MIMO lies in its potential energy efficiency compared to a corresponding single-antenna
system. It is shown in [4] that each single-antenna user in a massive MIMO system can scale down its transmit power
proportional to the number of antennas at the BS with perfect channel state information (CSI) or to the square root of
the number of BS antennas with imperfect CSI, to get the same performance as a corresponding single-input single-output
(SISO) system. This leads to higher energy efficiency and is very important for future wireless networks where excessive
energy consumption is a growing concern. On the other hand, if adequate transmit power is available, then a massive MIMO
system could significantly extend the range of operation compared with a single antenna system.
 Block Diagram and Model for MIMO

Figure 2. A RxT MIMO channel.

A MIMO system consisting of T transmit antennas and R receive antennas is shown in Figure 2. The received signal
y(n) at dicreet time n is related to the transmitted signal x(n) by

ȳ = H x x̄ + n̄

where ȳ is an Rx1 output vector,x̄ is an Tx1 input vector. n̄ is an Rx1 noise vector, Which represents additive white
gaussian noise (AWGN) and H(n) is the channel matrix, giving the channel impulse response at any discreet time n. i.e,

Figure 3. Model for MIMO.

Special cases of MIMO

When there are multiple antennas at the transmitter and only one receiver, as may occur, for example, on a cellular
forward link between the base station and a single mobile user, we call that type of system a Multiple Input Single Output
(MISO) system. When the opposite is true and there are multiple receive antennas but only one transmit antenna, that
system is called a Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) system. When using the term in the broad sense, we often refer to
MISO and SIMO systems as particular types of MIMO configurations. Conventional communication systems that only have
a single transmit antenna and a single receive antenna are called Single Input Single Output (SISO) communication systems.

MIMO systems with t transmit antennas and r receive antennas are referred to as rxt MIMO systems. Thus, for example,a
2x4 MIMO system implies that there are four transmit antennas and two receive antenns.
 Figure 4. Special cases of MIMO.

Introduction to spatial diversity

As we have just explained, one of the key purposes of MIMO communications is to improve communications reliability by
combating multipath fading, which is achieved through the creation of spatial diversity. In this section, we review the concept
of diversity, describe the difference between receive and transmit spatial diversity, and define three important performance
metrics: diversity order, diversity gain, and array gain.

The concept of diversity :

In most environments where wireless communication systems operate, the strength of the received signal varies with time,
which is called fading. Unfortunately, fading significantly degrades communications performance by causing the probability
of bit error to increase compared to what it would be if only white noise were present.In order to reduce the impact of
fading, the concept of diversity is often employed. Diversity refers to transmitting replicas of the same signal over a fading
channel in such a way that each replica fades independently of the others. When this happens, each replica tends to fade at
a different time, so the probability that all the replicas fade simultaneously decreases as the number of replicas gets larger.
By combining the replicas, however, the depths of the fades, and, so too, their adverse effects, can be significantly reduced
because the fades do not tend to occur at the same time.

Figure 5. Performance of binary signaling on a Rayleigh fading channel.

Reducing the impact of fading through diversity, therefore, involves two steps:
a) creating independent replicas of the signal; and
b) combining the replicas.
There are various ways to generate replicas of a signal for diversity purposes. One is to transmit the signal on different RF
frequencies that are spaced far enough apart that the fading occurs independently on each carrier. This is called frequency
diversity. Another diversity technique, called time diversity, involves transmitting the same signal at different times. In
a multipath environment, this occurs naturally because the same signal arrives at the receiver by traveling over multiple
physical paths, which tend to experience independent fading. Rake receivers are used to process such signals. A third way
to create diversity is to transmit the same information on signals having different polarizations, called polarization diversity.
Normally, fading is independent of signals having different polarizations. A fourth type of diversity is called spatial diversity,
which refers to transmitting the same information over different physical paths between the transmitter and receiver. One
way to create spatial diversity is to transmit a signal from one transmit antenna and receive it using multiple receive antennas.

Just as there are multiple ways to generate independent replicas of a signal, there are also different ways to combine
the replicas at the receiver. The simplest type of combining is called selective combining, which involves comparing the
replicas at each sample time and choosing the largest value for the output of the combiner. A second combining tech-
nique, called equal gain combining, involves adding the replicas together. The third, and most common type of combining
scheme, is called maximal ratio combining (MRC). In MRC, the replicas are added together in the same way as they are
in equal gain combining, but prior to being added they are first scaled in proportion to the signal-to-noise ratio of each replica.

Figure 6. A MIMO system for spatial diversity.

If the focus is on spatial diversity, information bits are normally encoded and modulated using conventional error correc-
tion coding and modulation techniques prior to undergoing some form of space-time coding (STC). At the receiver, space-time
decoding is performed followed by demodulation and error decoding.spatial diversity refers to techniques that are used to
improve the reliability on a communications link by combating fading and that spacetime coding is the means by which this
is accomplished.
Receive and transmit diversity :

Diversity techniques involved transmitting a single version of a signal and extracting replicas of the transmitted signal
at the receiver and then combining those replicas. Diversity of this type is called receive diversity because extraction of the
replicas is performed at the receiver.

Figure 7. Architecture of a communication system with receive diversity combining.

 Transmit diversity is radio communication using signals that originate from two or more independent sources that have
been modulated with identical information-bearing signals and that may vary in their transmission characteristics at any
given instant.It can help overcome the effects of fading, outages, and circuit failures. When using diversity transmission and
reception, the amount of received signal improvement depends on the independence of the fading characteristics of the signal
as well as circuit outages and failures.

Figure 8. Architecture of a communication system with Transmit diversity .

Considering antenna diversity, in many systems additional antennas may be expensive or impractical at the remote or
even at the base station. In these cases, transmit diversity can be used to provide diversity benefit at a receiver with multiple
transmit antennas only. With transmit diversity, multiple antennas transmit delayed versions of a signal, creating frequency-
selective fading, which is equalized at the receiver to provide diversity gain.Since transmit diversity with N antennas results
in N sources of interference to other users, the interference environment will be different from conventional systems with
one transmit antenna. Thus even if transmit diversity has almost the same performance as receive diversity in noise-limited
environments, the performance in interference-limited environments will differ.

There are two common metrics that are used to characterize the amount of spatial diversity in a MIMO system. They
are: diversity order and diversity gain. Diversity order, which we will denote by Nd, is simply the number of indepen-
dent replicas of a transmitted signal that are available at the receiver for combining. Since an Nt x Nr MIMO system has
up to NtNr independent paths between the transmitter and the receiver, it follows that spatial diversity is capable of achieving

max Nd = NtNr.
Intuitively, we would expect the performance of a communication system to improve as the diversity order increases. To
confirm this, Figure 9 shows the theoretical probability of bit error plotted as a function of average Eb/N0 for three different
types of binary modulation in Rayleigh fading, where Nd = 1, 2, and 4. These results assume the use of maximal ratio com-
bining. As anticipated, for a given signal-to-noise ratio, the probability of bit error decreases as Nd increases. Furthermore,
as we saw earlier in this plot also demonstrates that as Eb/N0 becomes large, the curves approach straight lines, and that
the slopes of these lines increase as the diversity order gets larger.

Figure 9. Performance of binary signals in Rayleigh fading with maximal ratio receive combining for three different
diversity order values.
 Space-time coding
Space-time codes fall into one of two primary classes: space-time block codes (STBCs) and space-time trellis codes
(STTCs). STBCs, in turn, fall into two subclasses called orthogonal spacetime block codes (OSTBCs) and non-orthogonal
space-time block codes (NOSTBCs).

Space–time block coding is a technique used in wireless communications to transmit multiple copies of a data stream
across a number of antennas and to exploit the various received versions of the data to improve the reliability of data transfer.
The fact that the transmitted signal must traverse a potentially difficult environment with scattering, reflection, refraction
and so on and may then be further corrupted by thermal noise in the receiver means that some of the received copies of the
data will be ’better’ than others. This redundancy results in a higher chance of being able to use one or more of the received
copies to correctly decode the received signal. In fact, space–time coding combines all the copies of the received signal in an
optimal way to extract as much information from each of them as possible.

STBCs as originally introduced, and as usually studied, are orthogonal. This means that the STBC is designed such that
the vectors representing any pair of columns taken from the coding matrix is orthogonal. The result of this is simple, linear,
optimal decoding at the receiver. Its most serious disadvantage is that all but one of the codes that satisfy this criterion
must sacrifice some proportion of their data rate (see Alamouti’s code).
Moreover, there exist quasi-orthogonal STBCs that achieve higher data rates at the cost of inter-symbol interference
(ISI). Thus, their error-rate performance is lower bounded by the one of orthogonal rate 1 STBCs, that provide ISI free
transmissions due to orthogonality.

A particularly elegant scheme for MIMO coding was developed by Alamouti. The associated codes are often called MIMO
Alamouti codes or just Alamouti codes.The MIMO Alamouti scheme is an ingenious transmit diversity scheme for two
transmit antennas that does not require transmit channel knowledge. The MIMO Alamouti code is a simple space time block
code that he developed in 1998.

Space–time trellis codes (STTCs) are a type of space–time code used in multiple-antenna wireless communications.
This scheme transmits multiple, redundant copies of a generalised TCM signal distributed over time and a number of
antennas (’space’). These multiple, ’diverse’ copies of the data are used by the receiver to attempt to reconstruct the actual
transmitted data. For an STC to be used, there must necessarily be multiple transmit antennas, but only a single receive
antennas is required; nevertheless multiple receive antennas are often used since the performance of the system is improved
by the resulting spatial diversity.
In contrast to space–time block codes (STBCs), they are able to provide both coding gain and diversity gain and have a
better bit-error rate performance. In essence they marry single channel continuous time coding with the signaling protocol
being used, and extend that with a multi-antenna framework. However, that also means they are more complex than STBCs
to encode and decode; they rely on a Viterbi decoder at the receiver where STBCs need only linear processing. Also, whereas
in a single transmitter, single receiver framework the Viterbi algorithm (or one of the sequential decoding algorithms) only
has to proceed over a trellis in a single time dimension, in here the optimal decoding also has to take into consideration the
number of antennas, leading to an extraneous polynomial complexity term.

Spatial multiplexing
Spatial multiplexing is possible because of the underlying propagation physics in a multipath communications channel.
In a multipath environment, energy from each transmit antenna arrives at each receive antenna after being scattered by
various objects. If the antenna spacing at the transmitter and receiver is sufficiently large, then the characteristics of the
scattering between each pair of transmit and receive antennas are sufficiently different that each one can be regarded as
fading independently of the others. This property can be exploited by the receiver using techniques that we describe in this
chapter to separate out the signals from each of the transmitters. A popular rule-of-thumb is that independent fading occurs
as long as the antenna spacing at both the transmitter and receiver is at least half a wavelength.

Figure 10. The basic components of a MIMO communication system that performs spatial multiplexing.
 Fig.10 shows a block diagram of a MIMO communication system that employs spatial multiplexing. This figure is similar
to Figure 1.10 except that it includes slightly more detail. Information bits are assumed to arrive on the left and may first
undergo optional conventional error control coding, which is performed by the encoder block. After encoding, the encoded
bit stream is passed through a serial-to-parallel converter that splits the serial input stream into K parallel streams. The next
block maps the K input streams into Nt streams that are fed to each of the transmit antennas. The block that performs this
mapping may employ some combination of either space-time coding, additional conventional error coding, and modulation,
depending on the particular type of spatial multiplexing scheme.

At the receiver, the signal at each antenna consists of the sum of the signals from all the transmitters. Since spatial mul-
tiplexing involves transmitting multiple distinct data streams, the receiver must be capable of demultiplexing (or decoupling)
the individual data streams from each other. That is the purpose of the “SM decoder” block shown in the diagram.1 The
SM decoder performs signal processing on the signals from the receive antennas and generates estimates of the individual
transmitted streams. A variety of different decoding techniques has been developed for this purpose, and the bulk of this
chapter is devoted to describing and analyzing some of the most common schemes.

In general, spatial multiplexing is achieved using a concept called layered space-time (LST) coding, of which there is a
variety of examples. In this context, a layer simply refers to a data stream from a single transmit antenna. Types of LST
codes include the following specific schemes:

1. Bell Laboratory layered space-time (BLAST) family of techniques:

a) Vertical BLAST (V-BLAST);
b) Horizontal BLAST (H-BLAST);
c) Diagonal BLAST (D-BLAST);
2. Multi-group space-time coding (MGSTC);
3. Threaded space-time coding (TSTC).

Before describing SM decoding in detail, we pause briefly in this section to consider the encoding architectures of the
BLAST-based schemes. The concepts of LST coding in general, and of D-BLAST in particular were first described by Fos-
chini in 1996. In 1998, Wolniansky et al. described a related SM architecture that they called V-BLAST, which was simpler
to implement than D-BLAST. In that paper, they presented laboratory results of the first demonstration of a practical
V-BLAST system. In 2000, Li et al. described a third type of BLAST-type architecture, which is similar to V-BLAST
except that it involves conventional coding on each layer. In that paper, they refered to this concept as simply “horizontal
coding for BLAST.” Finally, in 2003, Foschini et al. published a paper that summarizes BLAST architectures and in that
paper coined the term horizontal BLAST (H-BLAST) to describe the architecture first described . Although D-BLAST was
the first BLAST technique to be described, it is the most complex of the BLAST architectures. In the following discussion,
we go from least to most complex; thus, not in historical order.

In addition to these LST methods, spatial multiplexing can also be achieved using eigenbeamforming.Eigenbeamforming
is a practical SM technique that is used in most modern wireless communication systems; however, it is generally not regarded
as being a LST coded SM method. In this chapter, we focus our attention on the BLAST and MGSTC schemes.

The type of decoding algorithm that is used is an important consideration for LST coded SM systems. Four decoding
schemes have been analyzed extensively in MIMO literature:
1. Zero forcing (ZF)
2. Zero forcing with interference cancellation (ZF-IC)
3. Linear minimum mean square error estimation (LMMSE)
4. LMMSE with interference cancellation (LMMSE-IC).

Advantages of MIMO
• The higher data rate can be achieved with the help of multiple antennas and SM (Spatial Multiplexing) technique.
This helps in achieving higher downlink and uplink throughput.
• It helps in achieving reduction in BER (Bit Error Rate) due to application of advanced signal processing algorithms
on the received data symbols by multiple antennas.
• The systems with MIMO offers high QoS (Quality of Service) with increased spectral efficiency and data rates.
• The wide coverage supported by MIMO system helps in supporting large number of subscribers per cell.

.
 Disadvantages of MIMO
• The resource requirements and hardware complexity is higher compare to single antenna antenna based system. Each
antenna requires individual RF units for radio signal processing. Moreover advanced DSP chip is needed to run
advanced mathematical signal processing algorithms.
• The hardware resources increase power requirements. Battery gets drain faster due to processing of complex and
computationally intensive signal processing algorithms. This reduces battery lifetime of MIMO based devices.
• MIMO based systems cost higher compare to single antenna based system due to increased hardware and advanced
software requirements.

Conclusions
An overview of Massive-MIMO systems is discussed with regards to several different perspectives. It is a system, with
huge amount of antenna elements mounted at base station which provides a better link reliability with good coverage area.
It shows that bulky array configurations at base station enhance the efficiency of Spectrum and Energy dramatically. Multi-
user massive-MIMO combined with OFDM gives tremendous results regarding throughput. With proper channel estimation
at both uplink and downlink and using suitable techniques for precoding (like, Zero Forcing-ZF) at transmitter and good
detection techniques (like, Match Filter (MF) and MMSE) we can achieve better throughput even with low cost and low
quality, but power efficient, RF amplifiers. Other emerging technologies like, cognitive radio with massiveMIMO system
and millimeter wave communication with massive-MIMO system can play a significant role in next generation wireless com-
munication. A lot of research work on a number of issues like, highly correlated antenna systems, hardware impairments,
interference mitigation techniques, modulation and practical implementation, is needed to ripe the benefits of the massive-
MIMO technology in future communication systems of next generation.

References
1. Lu Lu, Geoffrey Ye Li, A. Lee Swindlehurst,Alexei Ashikhmin and Rui Zhang, ”An Overview of Massive MIMO:
Benefits and Challenges” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing ( Volume: 8 , Issue: 5 , Oct. 2014 ).
2. Introduction to MIMO Communications by Jerry R. Hampton.