Paper accepted for IEEE International Mediterranean Conference on Communications and Networking

7 September 2022

PhD student, Zhihan Ren, has had her paper – titled “Lattice quantization for centralized and scalable cell-free massive MIMO with realistic fronthaul” – accepted into the IEEE International Mediterranean Conference on Communications and Networking held in Athens, Greece.

The paper was co-authored by Prof Angela Doufexi and Prof Mark Beach.

Lattice quantization

The paper’s abstract can be read below:

To implement a practical large-scale cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network, the finite fronthaul capacity must be taken into consideration. This paper proposes two scalable lattice-based vector quantization schemes for the fronthaul compression of the fully centralized cell-free massive MIMO network. Both schemes require only the statistical information of the channel and achieve close-to-perfect fronthaul performance with few-bit lattice quantizers under different channel models. With the correlated Rayleigh channel model, adjusting the shape of the codebook according to the eigenvalue distribution of the channel correlation matrix at each access point (AP) improves the achievable spectral efficiency (SE) compared to simply applying the near-circular lattice codebook. Maximum ratio (MR) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) combining schemes are utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed quantization methods.

Zhihan was awarded the IEEE Travel Scholarship for the conference. She'll present her paper in the TS09 Networks and Systems 2 session on Thursday 8th September.