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This paper considers a challenging scenario of machine type communications, where we assume internet of things (IoT) devices send short packets sporadically to an access point (AP) and the devices are not synchronized in the packet level. High transmission efficiency and low latency are concerned. Motivated by the great potential of multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA) in massive access, we design a grant-free MIMO-NOMA scheme, and in particular differential modulation is used so that expensive channel estimation at the receiver (AP) can be bypassed. The receiver at AP needs to carry out active device detection and multi-device data detection. The active user detection is formulated as the estimation of the common support of sparse signals, and a message passing based sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) algorithm is designed to solve the problem. Due to the use of differential modulation, we investigate the problem of non-coherent multi-device data detection, and develop a message passing based Bayesian data detector, where the constraint of differential modulation is exploited to drastically improve the detection performance, compared to the conventional non-coherent detection scheme. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed active device detector and non-coherent multi-device data detector.

This paper considers the regularized estimation of covariance matrices (CM) of high-dimensional (compound) Gaussian data for minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming. Linear shrinkage is applied to improve the accuracy and condition number of the CM estimate for low-sample-support cases. We focus on data-driven techniques that automatically choose the linear shrinkage factors for shrinkage sample covariance matrix ($\text{S}^2$CM) and shrinkage Tyler's estimator (STE) by exploiting cross validation (CV). We propose leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) choices for the shrinkage factors to optimize the beamforming performance, referred to as $\text{S}^2$CM-CV and STE-CV. The (weighted) out-of-sample output power of the beamfomer is chosen as a proxy of the beamformer performance and concise expressions of the LOOCV cost function are derived to allow fast optimization. For the large system regime, asymptotic approximations of the LOOCV cost functions are derived, yielding the $\text{S}^2$CM-AE and STE-AE. In general, the proposed algorithms are able to achieve near-oracle performance in choosing the linear shrinkage factors for MVDR beamforming. Simulation results are provided for validating the proposed methods., Comment: To be submitted to the IEEE or Elsevier for possible publication

This paper investigates regularized estimation of Kronecker-structured covariance matrices (CM) for polarization radar in sea clutter scenarios where the data are assumed to follow the complex, elliptically symmetric (CES) distributions with a Kronecker-structured CM. To obtain a well-conditioned estimate of the CM, we add penalty terms of Kullback-Leibler divergence to the negative log-likelihood function of the associated complex angular Gaussian (CAG) distribution. This is shown to be equivalent to regularizing Tyler's fixed-point equations by shrinkage. A sufficient condition that the solution exists is discussed. An iterative algorithm is applied to solve the resulting fixed-point iterations and its convergence is proved. In order to solve the critical problem of tuning the shrinkage factors, we then introduce two methods by exploiting oracle approximating shrinkage (OAS) and cross-validation (CV). The proposed estimator, referred to as the robust shrinkage Kronecker estimator (RSKE), is shown to achieve better performance compared with several existing methods when the training samples are limited. Simulations are conducted for validating the RSKE and demonstrating its high performance by using the IPIX 1998 real sea data.

Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is promising to achieve low latency massive access in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In grant-free NOMA, pilot signals are often used for user activity detection (UAD) and channel estimation (CE) prior to multiuser detection (MUD) of active users. However, the pilot overhead makes the communications inefficient for IoT devices with sporadic transmissions and short data packets, or when the channel coherence time is short. Hence, it is desirable to improve the efficiency by avoiding the use of pilot signals, which can also further achieve lower latency. This work focuses on Bayesian receiver design for grant-free low density signature orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (LDS-OFDM), where each user is allocated a unique low density spreading sequence. We propose to use the low density spreading sequences for active user detection, thereby avoiding the use of pilot signals. Firstly, the task of joint UAD, CE and MUD is formulated as a structured signal estimation problem. Then message passing based Bayesian approach is developed to solve the structured signal estimation problem. In particular, belief propagation (BP), expectation propagation (EP) and mean field (MF) message passing are used to develop efficient hybrid message passing algorithms to achieve trade-off between performance and complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed receiver for grant-free LDS-OFDM without the use of pilot signals.

This paper considers uplink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with lowresolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) over Rician fading channels. Maximum-ratio-combining (MRC) and zero-forcing (ZF) receivers are considered under the assumption of perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). Low-resolution ADCs are considered for both data detection and channel estimation, and the resulting performance is analyzed. Asymptotic approximations of the spectrum efficiency (SE) for large systems are derived based on random matrix theory. With these results, we can provide insights into the trade-offs between the SE and the ADC resolution and study the influence of the Rician K-factors on the performance. It is shown that a large value of K-factors may lead to better performance and alleviate the influence of quantization noise on channel estimation. Moreover, we investigate the power scaling laws for both receivers under imperfect CSI and it shows that when the number of base station (BS) antennas is very large, without loss of SE performance, the transmission power can be scaled by the number of BS antennas for both receivers while the overall performance is limited by the resolution of ADCs. The asymptotic analysis is validated by numerical results. Besides, it is also shown that the SE gap between the two receivers is narrowed down when the K-factor is increased. We also show that ADCs with moderate resolutions lead to better energy efficiency (EE) than that with high-resolution or extremely low-resolution ADCs and using ZF receivers achieve higher EE as compared with the MRC receivers., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures

Hybrid massive MIMO structures with lower hardware complexity and power consumption have been considered as a potential candidate for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. Channel covariance information can be used for designing transmitter precoders, receiver combiners, channel estimators, etc. However, hybrid structures allow only a lower-dimensional signal to be observed, which adds difficulties for channel covariance matrix estimation. In this paper, we formulate the channel covariance estimation as a structured low-rank matrix sensing problem via Kronecker product expansion and use a low-complexity algorithm to solve this problem. Numerical results with uniform linear arrays (ULA) and uniform squared planar arrays (USPA) are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

This work concerns receiver design for light emitting diode (LED) communications where the LED nonlinearity can severely degrade the performance of communications. We propose extreme learning machine (ELM) based non-iterative receivers and iterative receivers to effectively handle the LED nonlinearity and memory effects. For the iterative receiver design, we also develop a data-aided receiver, where data is used as virtual training sequence in ELM training. It is shown that the ELM based receivers significantly outperform conventional polynomial based receivers; iterative receivers can achieve huge performance gain compared to non-iterative receivers; and the data-aided receiver can reduce training overhead considerably. This work can also be extended to radio frequency communications, e.g., to deal with the nonlinearity of power amplifiers.

Shrinkage can effectively improve the condition number and accuracy of covariance matrix estimation, especially for low-sample-support applications with the number of training samples smaller than the dimensionality. This paper investigates parameter choice for linear shrinkage estimators. We propose data-driven, leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) methods for automatically choosing the shrinkage coefficients, aiming to minimize the Frobenius norm of the estimation error. A quadratic loss is used as the prediction error for LOOCV. The resulting solutions can be found analytically or by solving optimization problems of small sizes and thus have low complexities. Our proposed methods are compared with various existing techniques. We show that the LOOCV method achieves near-oracle performance for shrinkage designs using sample covariance matrix (SCM) and several typical shrinkage targets. Furthermore, the LOOCV method provides low-complexity solutions for estimators that use general shrinkage targets, multiple targets, and/or ordinary least squares (OLS)-based covariance matrix estimation. We also show applications of our proposed techniques to several different problems in array signal processing., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Published in Signal Processing

Hybrid massive MIMO structures with reduced hardware complexity and power consumption have been widely studied as a potential candidate for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. Channel estimators that require knowledge of the array response, such as those using compressive sensing (CS) methods, may suffer from performance degradation when array-inherent impairments bring unknown phase errors and gain errors to the antenna elements. In this paper, we design matrix completion (MC)-based channel estimation schemes which are robust against the array-inherent impairments. We first design an open-loop training scheme that can sample entries from the effective channel matrix randomly and is compatible with the phase shifter-based hybrid system. Leveraging the low-rank property of the effective channel matrix, we then design a channel estimator based on the generalized conditional gradient (GCG) framework and the alternating minimization (AltMin) approach. The resulting estimator is immune to array-inherent impairments and can be implemented to systems with any array shapes for its independence of the array response. In addition, we extend our design to sample a transformed channel matrix following the concept of inductive matrix completion (IMC), which can be solved efficiently using our proposed estimator and achieve similar performance with a lower requirement of the dynamic range of the transmission power per antenna. Numerical results demonstrate the advantages of our proposed MC-based channel estimators in terms of estimation performance, computational complexity and robustness against array-inherent impairments over the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)-based CS channel estimator., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

Recently, a switch-based hybrid massive MIMO structure that aims to reduce the hardware complexity and power consumption has been proposed as a potential candidate for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. Exploiting the sparse nature of the mmWave channel, compressive sensing (CS)-based channel estimators have been proposed. When applied to real mmWave channels, the CS-based channel estimators may encounter heavy computational burden due to the high dimensionality of the basis. Meanwhile, knowledge about the response of the antenna array, which is needed for constructing the basis of the CS estimators, may not be perfect due to array uncertainties such as phase mismatch among array elements. This can result in the loss of sparse representation and hence the degraded performance of the CS estimator. In this paper, we propose a novel matrix completion (MC)-based low-complexity channel estimator. The proposed scheme is compatible with switch-based hybrid structures, does not need to specify a basis, and can avoid the basis mismatch issue. Compared with the existing CS-based estimator, the proposed basis-free scheme is immune to array response mismatch and exhibits a significantly lower complexity., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

Approximate message passing (AMP) and its variants, developed based on loopy belief propagation, are attractive for estimating a vector x from a noisy version of z = Ax, which arises in many applications. For a large A with i. i. d. elements, AMP can be characterized by the state evolution and exhibits fast convergence. However, it has been shown that, AMP mayeasily diverge for a generic A. In this work, we develop a new variant of AMP based on a unitary transformation of the original model (hence the variant is called UT-AMP), where the unitary matrix is available for any matrix A, e.g., the conjugate transpose of the left singular matrix of A, or a normalized DFT (discrete Fourier transform) matrix for any circulant A. We prove that, in the case of Gaussian priors, UT-AMP always converges for any matrix A. It is observed that UT-AMP is much more robust than the original AMP for difficult A and exhibits fast convergence. A special form of UT-AMP with a circulant A was used in our previous work [13] for turbo equalization. This work extends it to a generic A, and provides a theoretical investigation on the convergence., Comment: 5 pages