Instructors
Dr. Emil Björnson, emilbjo@kth.se
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Emil Björnson (S’07-M’12-SM’17) is currently a Visiting professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Associate Professor at Linköping University, Sweden. He has authored the textbooks Optimal Resource Allocation in Coordinated Multi-Cell Systems (2013), Massive MIMO Networks: Spectral, Energy, and Hardware Efficiency (2017), and Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO (2021). He is dedicated to reproducible research and has made a large amount of simulation code publicly available. He performs research on MIMO communications, radio resource allocation, machine learning for communications, and energy efficiency. Since 2017, he has been on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and the IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking since 2016. He has received the 2014 Outstanding Young Researcher Award from IEEE ComSoc EMEA, the 2015 Ingvar Carlsson Award, the 2016 Best Ph.D. Award from EURASIP, the 2018 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications, the 2019 EURASIP Early Career Award, the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize, and the 2019 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award. He also co-authored papers that received Best Paper Awards at the conferences, including WCSP 2009, the IEEE CAMSAP 2011, the IEEE WCNC 2014, the IEEE ICC 2015, WCSP 2017, and the IEEE SAM 2014.
Dr. Luca Sanguinetti, luca.sanguinetti@unipi.it
University of Pisa, Italy
Luca Sanguinetti (SM’15) is currently an Associate Professor with the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Pisa. He has coauthored the textbooks Massive MIMO Networks: Spectral, Energy, and Hardware Efficiency (2017) and Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO (2021). His expertise and general interests span the areas of communications and signal processing. Dr. Sanguinetti was a recipient of the 2018 Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications and coauthored an article that received the Young Best Paper Award from the ComSoc/VTS Italy Section. He was the recipient of the FP7 Marie Curie IEF 2013 “Dense deployments for green cellular networks”. He was also a co-recipient of the two best conference paper awards: IEEE WCNC 2013 and IEEE WCNC 2014. He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications (series on Green Communications and Networking) and as a Lead Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications Special Issue on “Game Theory for Networks”. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is also a member of the Executive Editorial Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.
Dr. Özlem Tuğfe Demir, ozlemtd@kth.se
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Özlem Tuğfe Demir received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2012, 2014, and 2018, respectively. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher with Linköping University, Sweden in 2019-2020. She is currently a Postdoc with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She has coauthored the textbook Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO (2021). Her research interests focus on signal processing and optimization in wireless communications, massive MIMO, beyond 5G multiple antenna technologies, deep learning, and green communications. She is a recipient of the IEEE SIU 2015 Conference Student Best Paper Award, the Best Thesis Award for M.S. Program and Graduate Courses Performance Award at the Middle East Technical University.
Motivation
As the first release of 5G has recently been finalized and commercial networks have been launched, it is time to look for new forward-looking research directions that have the potential to revolutionize the future of wireless. Just as the seminal papers on Massive MIMO were published 10 years ago, this is likely the time when the key technology components for 6G will be identified. Hence, this is the right time for researchers to catch onto new research directions and potentially find the next big thing.
In this tutorial, we will first go through the foundations of the original Cell-Free Massive MIMO, which is a recently proposed alternative infrastructure to overcome the key weaknesses of cellular systems. The first papers in this area are just a few years old and there are still many open problems. One important issue with the original form of Cell-Free Massive MIMO is scalability, which is one of the key topics that we will cover in this tutorial as well as possible solutions such as user-centric dynamiccooperation clustering. We will describe different methods for signal processing and spatial resource allocation including optimized techniques and scalable heuristics solutions. After providing some implementation constraints, we will discuss open problems related to this research direction.
The presentation will be based on our recently published textbook on the topic, “Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO”, which summarizes the state-of -the-art in the field and is the first book of its kind on this emerging topic. We are also planning to provide a free PDF of this book to the conference attendees.
Structure and content
This tutorial will be mainly based on slides. We can eitherprerecord or give the presentation live over the Internet. In any case, we would like to interact with the attendance through Q/A sessions. We have access to state-of -the-art video editing tools and are used to record videos.
This tutorial starts by giving a background of cellular Massive MIMO in 5G and by identifying the fundamental limits that call for a shift towards the cell-free paradigm. Next, we will introduce the foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO and explain the benefits of the cell-free operation compared to conventional cellular operation. Signal processing techniques for the operation of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO will be introduced with a particular emphasis on scalable implementation that guarantees feasible computational complexity and fronthaul in a large network with many mobile terminals. Spatial resource allocation with both optimized and scalable power control algorithms will be provided along with some implementation constraints that possibly lead to the new research problems. The tutorial will be based on the presenters’ recently published textbook on the same topic.
A tentative outline of the tutorial is provided below.
Cellular Massive MIMO in 5G and Beyond It (30 min, Presenter: Emil Björnson)
- Basic idea and operation of Massive MIMO in cellular communications
- The benefits compared to 4G
- The weaknesses and potential “beyond Massive MIMO” solutions
Foundations of Cell-free Massive MIMO (30 min Presenter: Luca Sanguinetti)
- Definition, motivation, and vision•Benefits over cellular networks
- User-centric operation with dynamic cooperation clustering
- System model for uplink and downlink
User-centric Cell-free Massive MIMO (1 hour, Presenter: Emil Björnson, Luca Sanguinetti, Özlem Tuğfe Demir)
- Network scalability
- Channel estimation, pilot assignment, and dynamic cooperation cluster formation
- Centralized and distributed uplink operation
- Centralized and distributed downlink operation
Spatial resource allocation (45 min, Presenter: Özlem Tuğfe Demir)
- Transmit power optimization
- Scalable distributed power control algorithms
Implementation constraints (15 min, Presenter: Emil Björnson)
- Hardware impairments
- Quantized fronthaul signaling
- Limited fronthaul connection
- Synchronization