LAWS: Large Antennas and Wide Spectrum

• Principal investigator: Suhas Diggavi (UCLA), Ashutosh Sabharwal (Rice), Lin Zhong (Rice).
• Sponsor: Intel and Verizon

Project synopsis

In this project, we are designing a new wireless architecture labeled LAWS for Large Antennas Wide Spectrum which leverages two hardware trends: infrastructure nodes and mobile handset with ever increasing hardware capabilities. Infrastructure nodes will continue to become more and more capable – not only will they be able to access new spectrum but also use 10s to 100s of antennas flexibly over the whole spectrum. Mobile handsets as well will continue to become more powerful, especially with simultaneous access to multiple radio technologies. For example, both Samsung Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5 can access 10–12 licensed and unlicensed bands, which is more spectrum than infrastructure nodes. Therefore both parts of the network, the infrastructure and mobile nodes, will continue to become more capable, yet in different dimensions. The key challenge is in “aligning” these two trends for a multiplicative gain and doing so in a scalable manner. We use the large-antennas to simplify the interference environment and use multiple radio technologies at the mobiles to initiate device-to-device (D2D) interaction for interference management. This has the complementary advantage that scenarios of clustered users that is challenging for massive MIMO is exactly where D2D coordination is most feasible (and useful). We plan to design and analyze schemes that leverage D2D side-channels coupled with massive MIMO for wireless interference management.