The large number of antennas in massive MIMO systems allows the base station to communicate with multiple users at the same time and frequency resource with multi-user beamforming. However, highly correlated user channels could drastically impede the spectral efficiency that multi-user beamforming can achieve. As such, it is critical for the base station to schedule a suitable group of users in each time and frequency resource block to achieve maximum spectral efficiency while adhering to fairness constraints among the users. In this paper, we consider the resource scheduling problem for massive MIMO systems with its optimal solution known to be NP-hard. Inspired by recent achievements in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to solve problems with large action sets, we propose SMART, a dynamic scheduler for massive MIMO based on the state-of-the-art Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) DRL model and the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm. Through comprehensive simulations using realistic massive MIMO channel models as well as real-world datasets from channel measurement experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in various channel conditions. Our results show that our proposed model performs very close to the optimal proportionally fair (Opt-PF) scheduler in terms of spectral efficiency and fairness with more than one order of magnitude lower computational complexity in medium network sizes where Opt-PF is computationally feasible. Our results also show the feasibility and high performance of our proposed scheduler in networks with a large number of users and resource blocks.
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Spectrally Efficient Pilot Structure and Channel Estimation for Multiuser FBMC Systems
In this paper, we consider channel estimation problem in the uplink of filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) systems. We propose a pilot structure and a joint multiuser channel estimation method for FBMC. Opposed to the available solutions in the literature, our proposed technique does not rely on the flat-channel condition over each subcarrier band or any requirement for placing guard symbols between different users’ pilots. Our proposed pilot structure reduces the training overhead by interleaving the users’ pilots in time and frequency. Thus, we can accommodate a larger number of training signals within the same bandwidth and improve the spectral efficiency. Furthermore, this pilot structure inherently leads to a reduced peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) compared with the solutions that use all the subcarriers for training. We analytically derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and mean square error (MSE) expressions for our proposed method. We show that these expressions are the same. This confirms the optimality of our proposed method, which is numerically evaluated through simulations. Relying on its improved spectral efficiency, our proposed method can serve a large number of users and relax pilot contamination problem in FBMC-based massive MIMO systems. This is corroborated through simulations in terms of sum-rate performance for both single cell and multicell scenarios.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1824558
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10188062
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICC 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC40277.2020.9148851
