“Our policy can be computed quickly, and it offers low overhead of information-exchange between devices and base stations,” said Kartik Ahuja, lead researcher. “This makes it a practical solution for improved network performance as femtocells become popular quickly.”
After testing the policy under various scenarios, the team proved up to 130% performance improvement compared to existing wireless interference policies, especially for dense and large-scale deployments of femtocells.
mmW Solution: Using rainfall to boost MIMO efficiency
As for mmW channels, which are still primarily limited to lab work, researchers have turned to a “smart antenna” technique called massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to incorporate the short pathways of mmW signals into existing wireless infrastructure.
The challenge here is that the characteristics of mmW MIMO systems and their responses to changing environments (such as inclement weather) have been relatively unknown. A global team of researchers, though, has found that rain might actually help with signal transmission, contrary to previous concerns.
Because mmW signals are about the same size as raindrops, the team expected physical water intervention and undesirable signal scattering. To test this for the first time, the team devised a model that would accurately capture the channel effects of rainfall taking into account the physical laws of mmW MIMO. They accomplished this by calculating statistical mmW wave characteristics under a random scattering medium. Then, using the model, they evaluated the performance of mmW MIMO under the simulated rain.
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The 2-D geometrical model for a mmW MIMO channel with uniform linear antenna arrays at both link ends. The circles in the figure represent rain drops.
Their results were surprising.
Common sense suggests that with more rain, the signal strength would get worse, but in fact the team found that isn’t always the case. With just the right amount of light rain, channel capacity actually increases before it declines because it’s able to take advantage of multidata streams before it suffers.
“Everyone thought that rain was just bad; we certainly thought it would have a detrimental effect,” said Andrea Goldsmith, researcher. “But in fact we found that you want to build a responsive MIMO system that can leverage and adapt to the rate of rain for optimal scattering, which can be easily done.”
The team went further to propose a strategy for how to do this using a transmitting method called statistical water-filling, which basically allows the system to “ride the good waves” by transmitting higher data rates when the time-varying channel can support it, and backing off on data rates when it can’t.
Any carrier could adopt this model, which can also be applied to broader environmental scenarios, such as snow and building obstructions.
Read more about femtocells and mmW in IEEE Xplore.