Beamforming Tensor Compression for Massive MIMO Fronthaul

Abstract

In the rapidly evolving landscape of 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) mobile cellular communications, efficient data compression and reconstruction strategies become paramount, especially in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. A critical challenge in these systems is the capacity-limited fronthaul, particularly in the context of the Ethernet-based Common Public Radio Interface (eCPRI) connecting baseband units (BBUs) and remote radio units (RRUs). This capacity limitation hinders the effective handling of increased traffic and data flows. We propose a novel two-stage compression approach to address this bottleneck. The first stage employs sparse Tucker decomposition, targeting the precoder tensor’s low-rank components for compression. The second stage further compresses these components using complex Givens decomposition and run-length encoding, substantially improving the compression ratio. Our approach specifically targets the Zero-Forcing (ZF) beamforming precoder in BBUs. By reconstructing this precoder in RRUs, we significantly alleviate the burden on eCPRI traffic, enabling more concurrent streams in the radio access network (RAN). Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method in Channel State Information (CSI) compression, paving the way for more efficient 5G/B5G fronthaul links.