Distributed Antenna Allocation Scheme for Massive MIMO Cellular Backhaul Networks

Abstract

Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) transmission is a key research area for incoming fifth-generation wireless communications. This technology uses numerous simultaneously transceiving antennas to utilize radio resources and to improve communication quality. Although massive MIMO is suitable for inter-base station (BS) wireless backhaul networks, how to adequately assign each BS's antennas remains unsolved. In this paper, a distributed mechanism termed hierarchical distributed adjustment is proposed. On the basis of the links' channel conditions, BSs' available antennas, users' service requirements, and neighbors' allocation decisions, the transceiving antennas of each link are adjusted to both fulfill the quality-of-service constraints and maximize the total utility of the best-effort traffic. Through analysis, we prove that this problem is nondeterministic polynomial-complete, and the performance gap between the proposed heuristic and the optimal solution is bounded. The simulation results indicate a promising performance and adaptive behavior under various conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to focus on this problem and to have achieved effective and flexible allocation.