2015 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), Workshop on Computing, Networking
and Communications (CNC)
A Novel Application of Massive MIMO:
Massive Antenna Systems for Wireless Entrance
(MAS-WE)
Kazuki Maruta, Atsushi Ohta, Satoshi Kurosaki, Takuto Arai and Masataka Iizuka
NTT Access Network Service Systems Laboratories, NTT Corporation
1-1 Hikari-no-oka, Yokosuka-Shi, Kanagawa, 239-0847, Japan
Emails: {maruta.kazuki, ohta.atsushi, kurosaki.satoshi, arai.takuto, iizuka.masataka}@lab.ntt.co.jp
Abstract This paper proposes a practical application of
Massive MIMO technology, Massive Antenna Systems for
Wireless Entrance (MAS-WE), and its related inter-user
interference (IUI) cancellation and scheduling techniques. MAS-
WE, on which the entrance base station (EBS) employs a large
number of antennas, can effectively provide high capacity
wireless entrance links to a large number of Wi-Fi access points
(APs) distributed in wide coverage area. The proposed
techniques have been ultimately simplified to be less impact for
their practical implementation in order to spatially multiplex
more than 16 signal streams with around 100 antenna elements at
EBS side. SIR performance was evaluated by system level
simulation considering imperfect channel state information (CSI)
and the results showed that the proposed MAS-WE with
simplified techniques can achieve high spectral efficiency with
high level space division multiplexing.
Keywords Massive MIMO; Multiuser MIMO; Inter-user
interference cancellation; Scheduling; Spatial correlation;
Sectorization
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the traffic on wireless access networks such
as WiMAX and LTE is explosively increasing with the
surprising diffusion of smart-phones. As a result, the
exhaustion of frequency resource, especially on micro-wave
band, is quite critical and it is one of the most important issues
on wireless communication. The offload approach to Wireless
LAN is an immediate solution for directly accommodating
such large traffic into our optical networks and save the
frequency resources for the cellular systems. On the other
hand, after the Great East Japan Earthquake, robust networks,
which can work continuously during very long interruption of
the power supply against huge disaster, is strongly desired for
safe and secure society.
As one of the solutions to such demand, we have proposed
Massive Antenna Systems for Wireless Entrance (MAS-WE).
MAS-WE provides easy Wi-Fi access through Relay Stations
(RSs) equipped with Access Point (AP) functions, as shown in
Fig. 1. The basic concept of MAS-WE is the self-sufficient
network infrastructures which do not require both wired power
supply and wired links. If RSs can be driven by solar cell and
battery, their installation becomes flexible and MAS-WE also
could contribute to solve the global environment problems.
Therefore, we believe that MAS-WE is quite effective in
978-1-4799-6959-3/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE
Radius: ~3km
Relay Station (RS)
High order spatial with Wi-Fi AP function
division multiplexing
Entrance
Base Station (EBS)
with massive antennas Wi-Fi access
Fig. 1. Concept of MAS-WE.
peacetime as well as emergency. In order to make the MAS-
WE attractive and effective, the total capacity should be larger
as much as possible. We introduce some new ideas to
maximize the gain of the Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-
Output (Massive MIMO) [2]-[4] technologies. First feature is
that the systems can work on nearly static channel condition
by focusing limited application. In addition, we propose its
related two simplified techniques; inter-user interference (IUI)
cancellation scheme and scheduling method. The former can
be realized by recursive signal processing and the latter can
reduce spatial correlation (inter-user correlation) utilizing
angular difference between users. These proposed techniques
exploit features of MAS-WE. This paper shows the
effectiveness of the proposed techniques and MAS-WE can be
a practical application of massive MIMO.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
presents the features of MAS-WE. Section III describes the
proposed IUI cancellation scheme and user scheduling method,
respectively. Computer simulation results are shown in
Section IV. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section V. In
this paper, normal letters represent scalar quantities, bold
lowercase letters indicate vectors and uppercase letters
indicate matrices. |.|, (.)T and (.)* represents absolute value,
transpose and conjugate transpose, respectively. It is noted
that "user" means RS hereafter.
II. FEATURES OF MAS-WE
The Entrance Base Station (EBS) equips a large number of
antennas and effectively provides wireless entrance links to
RSs spread in the wide service area via Multiuser MIMO
(MU-MIMO) [1]. The RS has only single antenna and it also
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 2015 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), Workshop on Computing, Networking
and Communications (CNC)

has a function of Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) for easy access where hij denotes the CSI from the j-th EBS antenna to the i-th
by widely prevalent Wi-Fi terminals. When MAS-WE, for RS and hi=(h11, h12, , h1L) 1L represents channel vector of
example, covers 3km in radius while coverage of Wi-Fi AP is the i-th RS. First, we propose IUI cancellation scheme based
100m one, the EBS should accommodate about 900 of Wi-Fi on Equal Gain Transmission (EGT) weight. In the DL, EGT
cells. A large capacity for the entrance links is required and it has better applicability than MRT since the transmission
should be achieved by higher order space division power is restricted for each amplifier of transceiver antenna
multiplexing (SDM) due to the limitation of the frequency elements. In the UL, MRC is suitable for maximizing
resources. reception performance. EGT weight matrix, W, is simply
obtained from phase inversion of H;
In the last few years, massive MIMO emerges and has been
investigated because of its attractiveness in scalability and h11* *
h21 hM* 1
hM 1

energy efficiency [2]-[4]. Since a large number of CSIs are h h21
* 11
required to be estimated, they have been mainly discussed h12 
from viewpoints of pilot contamination and channel h12
1
reciprocity calibration based on time division duplex (TDD). W h *ji
LM  
MAS-WE can eliminate these problems because the EBS and h ji
RSs are fixedly installed in a height and almost line of site 
(LOS) environment is assumed. It yields stable channel state h1*L *
hML

composed of strong direct path and feeble reflected paths.
h1L hML
Therefore, once Channel State Information (CSI) is obtained w11 w12  w1M
and calibrated, it can be utilized over the long period for the w 
downlink (DL) or the uplink (UL) SDM. In other words, 21

 wij 
assuming CSI estimation is carried out before the
communication service starts, frequent estimation procedure 
w wLM
can be omitted during ordinary operation. Thus pilot L1 
contamination problems can be avoided by scheduled CSI w1 w 2  wM  . (2)
estimation for RSs in wide area. wi=(w11, w21, , wL1)T L1 is EGT weight vector for the i-th
Other considerable problem of massive MIMO is a huge RS. The transmission signal vector is T=(t1, t2, , tM)T M1
computational complexity for SDM. Complexity to calculate and the reception signal vector R=(r1, r2, , rM)T M1 is
the transmission or reception weight for (MU-)MIMO, e.g. then given by,
Zero Forcing (ZF) [1], generally increases with the number of R HWT  N
transmission antennas, L, and squared number of reception h1 t1 n1
antennas, M2, i.e. O(LM2). Such weight calculation including h
CSI acquisition must be performed whenever the combination 2 w1 w 2  w M  t 2  n2
of users is changed. Exploiting excess degree of freedom,   
h t n
Maximal Ratio Transmission (MRT) and Maximal Ratio M M M
Combining (MRC) can be applied in reasonable complexity h1 w1 h1 w 2  h1 w M t1 n1
but its multiplexing gain is limited compared to ZF approach h w h n
2 1   2 w M t 2 2
since MRT/MRC does not suppress IUI. Multiuser scheduling  hi w j 
[5] is generally incorporated to appropriately obtain    
multiplexing gain, however, its computational load is also too h w h w
M 1 M 2  hM w M t M n
M


impractical to search an optimal combination from a large
number of users. The impact of such computational load (U  V )T  N , (3)
becomes exponentially larger with increasing the number of h1 w1 0  0 0
antennas and multiplexed signal streams. In order to increase 0  0
multiplexing gain with simplified approach on MAS-WE, we
U  h w
i i  , (4)
propose two techniques explained in following section.
0  0
0 0  0 hM w M
III. SIMPLIFIED TECHNIQUES FOR MAS-WE
A. Novel Inter-user Interference cancellation 0 h1 w 2  h1 w M
h w h
When L EBS antennas and M RSs are spatially multiplexed 2 1  2wM
V  (5)
to communicate simultaneously via the same frequency 0 .
channel, the DL channel matrix H ML is represented as;  
h w h w  0
M 1 M 2
h11 h12  h1L h1 N=(n1, n2, , nM)T M1 denotes an additive white Gaussian
h  h
21 2 noise (AWGN) vector. HW=U+V is an MM matrix where U
H  hij   , (1) is defined as diagonal matrix composed of desired components
 and V is defined as a non-diagonal matrix composed of
h  hML h interference ones. Here, we introduce IUI cancellation signals
M1 M
in order to eliminate interference signal term, VT, in (3).

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 2015 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), Workshop on Computing, Networking
and Communications (CNC)

Weight matrix to generate IUI cancellation signals, W, can be K

defined as follows, T (K ) T
k 0
(k )
. (11)
h1 w 2 h1 w 3 h1 w M
0     With the proposed method, IUI cancellation can be
h1 w1 h1 w1 h1 w1 practiced by symbol-by-symbol operation which superposes
 h2 w1 0
hw
 2 3
hw
  2 M
h2 w 2 the IUI cancelation signals to the initial transmission signal as
h2 w 2 h2 w 2
W U 1V hw h3 w 2 . (6) well as exploiting simple EGT weight. Its computational
 3 1  0   complexity can be estimated as O(KM2) from (10). With
h3 w 3 h3 w 3 regarding required value of K is around 4 (see results below)
    
hM w1 hM w 2 hM w 3 while conventional ZF requires O(LM2) for large number of
    0 antennas, e.g. L>100. In addition, the calculation on the
hM w M hM w M hM w M proposed scheme in (10) which comprises only multiplication
IUI cancellation signals are generated as WT and superposed of the matrix and the vector is quite simple. It is suitable for
on the initial transmission signal, T. The new reception signal iterative signal processing and can reduce the hardware impact
vector, R(1), is now expressed as; for the practical implementation. On the contrary, the signal
R (1) HW T  WT   N processing on such as ZF, MMSE, or SVD are complex and
they have difficulties for hardware implementation in case of
U  V T  WT   N large scale channel matrix. Moreover, CSI and weight vectors
U  V  U W  V W T  N can be available for a long period since MAS-WE assumes
U  V W T  N .
The proposed method replaces the IUI term VT in (3) with
VWT in (7). Each absolute element of W is expected to be
much smaller than one because the denominator is a result of
EGT intensifying desired signal strength L-fold whereas the
numerator indicates a randomly added complex value of IUI
increasing L-fold. In order to make IUI cancellation effective,
the EGT gain is required to be larger than the sum of
interference intensity as follows;
M
hi w i ! hi w j .
j zi
Though EGT itself cannot reduce IUI power, introducing IUI
cancelation signals, WT, can further reduce IUI components.
If elements of hi have the same amplitude because of LOS
channel, wi=hi*/|hi|. Thus the element of W can be rewritten
as -hiwj/hiwi=-hihj*/(|hi||hj|). It indicates normalized spatial
correlation between the i-th and the j-th RSs. IUI cancellation
performance of the proposed scheme can be improved by
incorporating scheduling method to reduce the spatial
correlation. VWT, called residual IUI shown in (7) can be
further reduced by introducing second order IUI cancelation
signals, W2T. Similarly, applying K-th order IUI cancellation
signals yields reception signal vector of general expression,
R(K), as indicated by,
(7) stable channel environment as explained in the section 1. Once
the EBS calculates wi and -hiwj/hiwi for all combination of RSs
beforehand, W and W can be easily constructed by reading
corresponding values of multiplexing RSs from the memory
without any calculation. These features can significantly
reduce computational complexity and improve flexibility of
scheduling. Similarly, the proposed scheme can be applied to
the UL. Note that MRC weight is applied for the UL reception
instead of EGT weight.
B. Low Correlation User Scheduling
(8)
MAS-WE assumes accommodating hundreds of RSs in
LOS wide area coverage and a few dozen of RSs are to be
spatially multiplexed. Spatial correlation between RSs, that is,
the inner product between channel vector of the i-th RS hi and
that of the j-th RS hj, is an important factor in SDM. In
general, the expected value of the inner product between two
general vectors with random value decreases as the dimension
of the vector grows. Massive antenna provides the large
dimension of channel vector and thereby the lower channel
vector correlation between RSs is expected. However, in the
LOS case that RSs exist in the same direction from the EBS,
spatial correlation may increase. Fig. 2 shows the normalized
absolute value of spatial correlation between the i-th and the j-
th RSs with azimuth angular difference, . This rough
evaluation considers only LOS channel model, EBS equips
R(K ) HW T  WT  W 2T    W K T   N 128 antennas and two RSs are located at a radius of 3km.
K Spatial correlation is obtained by following inner product
(U  V ) W k T  N calculation;
i 0
K K 1 f (T ) hi h*j hi h j . (12)
UT  V W
i 1
k
T V W
i 0
k
T  V W K T  N
From Fig. 2, spatial correlation value decreases as increase of
K
K and exhibits the lower value than 0.2 when =5~30.
U  U W  V W  V W T  N
k 1

i 1 Otherwise, it fluctuates irregularly regardless of . It indicates

U  V W K T  N . (9) that selecting RSs located in the similar direction may
(k)
deteriorate multiplexing gain because strong correlation
Assuming T (k=1, ..., K) as a transmission signal at k-th breaks relationship in (8). In MAS-WE, RSs are assumed to be
order, it can be expressed by using recursive formula; fixedly arranged and their positional information, i.e. direction
T ( k ) WT ( k 1) , where T ( 0) T . (10) from the EBS, is available on the scheduling process. Utilizing
this directional information, we propose the simplified
Resultant transmission signal applied IUI cancellation up to K- scheduling method to reduce the spatial correlation between
th order, T(K), is derived as follows, RSs.

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 2015 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), Workshop on Computing, Networking
and Communications (CNC)

1.0 TABLE I
Normalized spatial correlation SIMULATION PARAMETERS
0.8 Parameters Values
Carrier frequency 5.2 GHz
0.6 Propagation model Free space propagation
CSI estimation error 2 = -16 dB
0.4 EBS / RS height 30 / 10 m
Number of EBS / RS antenna 128 / 1
0.2 12 dBm /antenna
EBS Transmission power (total 33.1 dBm)
Omni-directional antenna,
0 EBS antenna configuration Circular array with
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 2 wavelength spacing
5 EBS / RS antenna gain 5 / 14 dBi
Azimuth angle difference [degree]
Fig. 2. Spatial correlation with angular difference. Radius of service area 3 km
Number of RS 900, uniformly distributed
Number of sector MS

In each sector, RS is selected at random. The switchover of the

(a) S=1 (b) S=2
Fig. 3. User scheduling by sectorization.
The basic principle of the method is cell sectorization as
shown in Fig. 3, and the EBS selects up to one RS per one
sector so as to avoid selecting RSs in the same direction.
However, the EBS still may select close RSs locating around
boundary of sectors as shown in Fig. 3 (a). In order to avoid
such high-correlated situation, cell is divided into S groups and
M RSs are alternately selected from grouped sectors. When
S=2 or 4, angular difference corresponding to S-1 sector(s) can
be guaranteed as seen by Fig. 3 (b) and (c). It stably provides
reduced spatial correlation. Though the proposed scheduling
method assumes LOS channel environment, the practical
environment faces stable reflected paths and they may affect to
the behavior of the sectorization approach. Since effects from
reflected waves are expected to be independent, spatial
correlation is also expected to be decreased with increasing the
number of antennas, i.e. channel vector dimension. Therefore,
the proposed scheduling method is still effective to reduce the
spatial correlation even in a pessimistic condition such as LOS
channel environment.
IV. SYSTEM LEVEL SIMULATION
A. Simulation Parameters
System level performance on wireless entrance links is
evaluated. Simulation parameters are summerized in Table I.
Assuming free space propagation in LOS environment, CSI
from the j-th EBS antenna to the i-th RS, hij, is represented as,
2S d ij
O j
O
hij e ,
sector group and the selection of RSs are assumed to be
(c) S=4
carried out every time slot. This evaluation takes into account
the CSI estimation error due to the time varying channel. CSI
including estimation error is given by,
~
hij hij  H , (14)
where represents the CSI estimation error modeled as zero-
mean complex Gaussian random variables with variance of 2.
In this evaluation, value of is assumed 15% for the ideal
channel gain of hij, and it corresponds to 2=-16dB to the
power value of CSI, |hij|2. Since MAS-WE is assumed to
provide an interference-limited environment, following
evaluations observe SIR on the DL as an evaluation metric.
SIR can be calculated from square absolute element of
U+VWK in (9), regarding diagonal element as desired signal
power and column-wise summation of non-diagonal elements
as interference signal power. MATLAB is used as a
simulation tool.
B. Simulation results
Fig. 4 shows SIR performance for Cumulative Distribution
Function (CDF) =50% and 1% with IUI cancellation order, K,
when the number of multiplexing, M, is 16. K=0 indicates the
case without the proposed IUI cancellation scheme, i.e. only
EGT. SIR value increases as K increases and it tends to
saturate. Since the simulation considers imperfect CSI, IUI
cannot be completely suppressed even if large K is applied.
Nevertheless, SIR at CDF=50% can be greatly improved by
30
M=16 CDF=50%
20
(13)
SIR [dB]

4S d ij CDF=1%
10 14.4dB
dB
B
where dij represents the distance from the j-th EBS antenna to
the i-th RS and indicates the wave length. Since EGT with w/ scheduling, S=2
w/o scheduling
excess degree of freedom can reduce the influence of inter-cell 0
interference for the cell-edge RSs, evaluation assumes single-
cell model and focuses on IUI suppression performance. 900
RSs are uniformly distributed in area of 3km radius and they -10
are served by the single EBS. Coverage area is divided into 02 4 6 8 10
MS sectors. When M=16 and S=2, the number of sector is 32 Interference cancellation order K
and 16 RSs are alternately selected from the same sector group. Fig. 4. SIR performance with cancellation order (M=16).

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 2015 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), Workshop on Computing, Networking
and Communications (CNC)
40
S=2
Proposed, K=4
30 ZF
EGT
20
SIR [dB]
10 CDF=50%
0
CDF=1%
-10
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Number of multiplexing M
Fig. 5. SIR performance with number of multiplexing.
14.4dB when increasing K from 0 to 4. Fig 4 also shows the
effectiveness of the proposed scheduling method. In the case
without scheduling, spatially high correlated RSs are
sometimes selected at the same time. The requirement (8)
cannot be satisfied on such situation and the IUI cannot be
appropriately suppressed. This results in the characteristic that
SIR at CDF=1% becomes poor. Since the proposed scheduling
(S=2) can select low correlated RSs and stably provide higher
SIR at K=0, IUI cancellation can effectively work on it. As a
result, when M=16, CDF=50% and 1% value of SIR can
achieve 23.0dB and 16.7dB, respectively by the proposed
techniques.
Fig. 5 shows the relationship between SIR for CDF=50%
and 1% and the number of multiplexing RSs, M. Here, the SIR
performances of three cases below are compared;
- The proposed IUI cancellation (K=4)
- ZF (with total transmission power constraint)
- EGT (K=0 in the proposed scheme)
Scheduling based on the sectorization is applied for all three
cases. With comparing SIR at CDF=50%, ZF achieves the best
performance since it directly remove IUI. However, it is
notable that SIR at CDF=1% of the proposed scheme
outperforms that of ZF when M<32. This is because ZF
enhance IUI in low CDF region while the proposed scheme
additionally cancels residual IUI upon obtaining sufficient
desired signal power by EGT. Therefore, the proposed scheme
is more tolerant to CSI estimation error than ZF.
It is observed that SIR of the proposed scheme at CDF=1%
can be improved compared to EGT case when M<40. For
larger M, the requirement (8) cannot be satisfied only with
EGT and it conversely causes interference enhancement
because of adding erroneous IUI cancellation signal. For
instance, assuming SIR=20dB and 10dB for CDF=50% and
1% as the requirements respectively, M=20 can be achieved
by the proposed scheme. This evaluation considered 2=-16dB
of CSI estimation error as degradation factor. Even if the CSI
estimation error is much larger, it is possible to meet the
required communication quality by optimizing the spatial
multiplexing order, M, interference suppression order, K, and
the number of the EBS antenna, L, in accordance with the
channel fluctuation in the real environments.
Fig. 6 shows the relationship between CDF and SIR for
different numbers of sector groups to evaluate effectiveness
335
100
w/o Scheduling
S=1
S=2
S=4
10-1
CDF
10-2
M=16, K=4
10-3
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SIR [dB]
Fig. 6. CDFs of SIR (M=16, K=4).
of the scheduling method. Simulation was conducted with
M=16 and K=4. SIR performances are shown for each
sectorization group, S. The proposed scheduling is effective
especially in lower CDF region. It can be seen that good SIR
is stably obtained for all S even though selection constraint is
quite simplified. While SIR performances can be further
improved by arranging the redundant number of sectors,
increase of S degrades flexibility of RS selection. Therefore, S
should be determined considering required SIR and scheduling
flexibility.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper newly proposed a practical solution of massive
MIMO technology, Massive Antenna Systems for Wireless
Entrance (MAS-WE). Additionally, its related two techniques
are presented; inter-user interference cancellation which can
be simply realized by recursive signal processing utilizing
EGT weight (on DL, MRC is utilized on UL), and simplified
scheduling which can reduce spatial correlation exploiting
angular difference between users. SIR performance was
evaluated by computer simulations with considering the effect
of imperfect CSI as a practical channel fluctuation. Simulation
results showed that more than 16 signal streams multiplexing
can be achieved with around 100 antenna elements at EBS
side. The potential of the proposed techniques achieving high
spectral efficiency in wide coverage was exhibited. Feasibility
of MAS-WE will be experimentally investigated via CSI
measurement.
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