Low complexity zero-forcing beamforming for distributed massive MIMO systems in large public venues

Distributed massive MIMO systems, which have high bandwidth efficiency and can accommodate a tremendous amount of traffic using algorithms such as zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF), may be deployed in large public venues with the antennas mounted under-floor. In this case the channel gain matrix H can be modeled as a multi-banded matrix, in which off-diagonal entries decay both exponentially due to heavy human penetration loss and polynomially due to free space propagation loss. To enable practical implementation of such systems, we present a multi-banded matrix inversion algorithm that substantially reduces the complexity of ZFBF by keeping the most significant entries in H and the preceding matrix W. We introduce a parameter p to control the sparsity of H and W and thus achieve the tradeoff between the computational complexity and the system throughput. The proposed algorithm includes dense and sparse preceding versions, providing quadratic and linear complexity, respectively, relative to the number of antennas. We present analysis and numerical evaluations to show that the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) increases linearly with p in dense precoding. In sparse preceding, we demonstrate the necessity of using directional antennas by both analysis and simulations. When the directional antenna gain increases, the resulting SIR increment in sparse precoding increases linearly with p, while the SIR of dense precoding is much less sensitive to changes in p.