On the operation of massive MIMO with and without transmitter CSI

Abstract

The paper considers the issue of activating inactive terminals by control signaling in the downlink in a massive MIMO system. There are two basic difficulties with this. First, the lack of CSI at the transmitter. Second, the short coherence interval, which limits the number of orthogonal pilots in the case of many antennas. The proposed scheme deals with these issues by repeating the transmission over the antennas. We show that this repetition does not affect the spectral efficiency significantly, while making it possible to estimate the channel in a standard way using MMSE. The paper also sheds some light the uplink-downlink power balance in massive MIMO.