Application of Large-Scale, Decentralised and Distributed Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Systems to Universal Basic Internet

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Microwave and Wireless Communications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2022) | Viewed by 2063

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
College of Engineering & Computer Science, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
Interests: universal basic open source internet; large-scale distributed and decentralised wireless networks; radio frequency engineering; software-defined radio

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Due to a lack of accessibility or affordability, about half of the world’s population remains unconnected to the internet and mobile services. Satellite and mobile (5G) are unlikely to alter this situation. Despite this, virtually the entire world’s population lives within a 100 km radius of  a major city. Consequently, recent advances across disparate areas of wireless research may now make it possible to develop a low cost, modular, and scalable universal basic internet (UBI) solution.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (massive MIMO) networks have produced a paradigm shift in wireless communications. However, implementations so far have been confined, for practical reasons, to cellular and centralised architectures. As a result, massive MIMO is not scalable to a UBI solution.

Recently, interest has turned to distributed and decentralised massive MIMO. Geographically distributed service antennas allow the RF power on the entire network to be scaled according to the number of deployed service antennas. Decentralisation facilitates the minimisation of signal processing and back-/fronthaul signalling overheads.

The aim of this Special Issue is to focus on as many advances in wireless research as needed to bring to bear a UBI solution. Advances in massive MIMO will be considered for the physical layer. One example might be a large-scale distributed massive MIMO base station based on decentralised processing and microwave backhaul that serves as a very large cell of isolated clients with a conventional up- and downlink. A second example might be ad hoc architecture involving a large-scale mesh network of massive MIMO clusters which communicate with each other using point-to-point MIMO MAC or broadcast.

Submissions to this Special Issue “The Application of Large-Scale, Decentralised and Distributed Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Systems to Universal Basic Internet” are solicited to forge progress toward the development of a UBI wireless network. Contributions may include techniques to minimise signalling over existing low-cost backhaul technologies (WiFi LAN), new radio designs that facilitate decentralised beam-forming, novel techniques for large-scale distributed synchronisation, novel protocols or statistical metrics to minimise communications overhead, new ways to use radio spectrum etc.

Dr. Gerard Borg
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • MIMO
  • massive MIMO
  • cell-free networks
  • large-scale antenna systems
  • ad hoc networks
  • power control
  • long range communications
  • synchronisation
  • protocols
  • back-/fronthaul signalling
  • distributed networks
  • decentralised networks
  • scalable networks
  • modular networks
  • WiFi
  • Ethernet
  • microwave links
  • radio frequency electronics
  • radio frequency techniques
  • radio frequency spectrum
  • terrestrial propagation
  • software defined radio
  • signal processing
  • channel estimation
  • information theory
  • information capacity
  • statistical methods

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

21 pages, 433 KiB  
Article
Distributed Base Station: A Concept System for Long-Range Broadband Wireless Access
by Muhammed Faruk Gencel, Maryam Eslami Rasekh and Upamanyu Madhow
Electronics 2021, 10(19), 2396; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10192396 - 30 Sep 2021
Viewed by 1408
Abstract
We propose a concept system termed distributed base station (DBS) which enables distributed transmit beamforming at large carrier wavelengths to achieve significant range extension and/or increased downlink data rate, providing a low-cost infrastructure for applications such as rural broadband. We consider a frequency [...] Read more.
We propose a concept system termed distributed base station (DBS) which enables distributed transmit beamforming at large carrier wavelengths to achieve significant range extension and/or increased downlink data rate, providing a low-cost infrastructure for applications such as rural broadband. We consider a frequency division duplexed (FDD) system using feedback from the receiver to achieve the required phase coherence. At a given range, N cooperating transmitters can achieve N2-fold increase in received power compared to that for a single transmitters, and feedback-based algorithms with near-ideal performance have been prototyped. In this paper, however, we identify and address key technical issues in translating such power gains into range extension via a DBS. First, to combat the drop in per-node SNR with extended range, we design a feedback-based adaptation strategy that is suitably robust to noise. Second, to utilize available system bandwidth, we extend narrowband adaptation algorithms to wideband channels through interpolation over OFDM subcarriers. Third, we observe that the feedback channel may become a bottleneck unless sophisticated distributed reception strategies are employed, but show that acceptable performance can still be obtained with standard uplink reception if channel time variations are slow enough. We quantify system performance compactly via outage capacity analyses. Full article
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