Distributed and Co-located Large Scale Antenna Systems in Dense Self-Organized Wireless Networks

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It is estimated that one third of the world population is now online, a figure that is on the rise. Also, spurred by the "smart phone and tablet" era, each individual user consumes an increasing amount of Internet bandwidth, and the proportion of that bandwidth that is consumed wirelessly is also rising. In fact, global IP traffic will nearly quadruple by 2016. Furthermore, at that time, the number of devices connected to IP networks will be 3 times larger than the global population. To sustain such tremendous growth in the wireless sphere while providing better reliability and user experience than today's networks, and to do so at a reasonable cost with minimal carbon footprint present staggering technical challenges. One of the most promising avenues to solve this challenge resides in large-scale antenna arrays (LSAS), whereby cellular base stations for example would be equipped with hundreds or even thousands of small antennas. Theoretical work has shown that this would allow huge capacity gains, as the effect of multiuser interference and noise would vanish. Also, the required transmission power would shrink considerably, possibly by a factor of 1000. In conjunction two other key ideas, distributed antenna systems and self-organization, the present research proposal tackles the practical development of LSAS. Specifically, it addresses the development of algorithms and architectures supporting the evolution of dense and high bit-rate wireless networks (e.g. cellular, WiFi or other) through the use of very large antenna arrays, with a focus on 1- making available the advantages of large-scale antenna systems (LSAS) at a reasonable cost in the near future; 2- in the context of LSAS, developing effective low-complexity array processing techniques for detection, transmission, and channel estimation through (a) antenna or beam selection, and (b) array partitioning techniques; 3- exploring the concept of distributed arrays with self-organization; and 4- whenever appropriate, assess complexity and practical issues with specific hardware prototypes in mind.