Design of massive distributed antenna systems in 5G networks

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Mobile networks are currently in an era of unprecedented traffic growth and consumer interest. Globally, mobile data traffic grew 74% in 2015 to 3.7 exabytes per month - and is further expected to grow by a factor of nine to 30.6 exabytes per month in 2020. However, the bandwidth available to wireless network providers is growing extremely slowly. To account for the mismatch between supply and demand, the upcoming fifth generation (5G) of networks must be orders of magnitude more capable and reliable. Furthermore, equipment manufacturers, such as our partner, Ericsson Canada, are well aware of the need to mitigate the rapid increase in the energy consumed by wireless networks. Addressing these challenges will require increasingly diversified technologies, including heterogeneous networks, densification, massive multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) technology, and possibly millimeter-wave systems. In this regard, the release of the first 5G standard, expected in mid-2017, will mark the beginning of a new phase in on-going research efforts. Focusing on 5G networks, this proposal focuses on massive distributed antenna systems (DAS) or distributed massive MIMO (DM-MIMO) systems. The term "distributed antennas systems" refers to a group of geographically distributed remote radio heads (RRHs), each with a single antenna or just a few antennas, coordinating transmissions to groups of users. The key benefit of DAS is the relative uniformity in coverage (as antennas are distributed across the coverage area) and increased robustness against fading including, importantly, shadowing (since users are able to connect to multiple, spatially distributed, RRHs simultaneously). However, greatly expanding the number of RRHs raises enormous challenges in both theoretical analyses and practical designs. It is this challenge that we hope to address.