Circuits and systems for 5G network: Massive MIMO and advanced coding

This paper serves as an overview to the special session “Circuits and Systems for 5G” on IEEE International Conference on ASIC (ASICON) 2015. More specifically, we introduce two of enabling technologies for the coming 5G wireless era, namely massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique and advanced coding techniques such as polar codes. Massive MIMO is a relatively new wireless communication concept in the paradigm of multi-user multi-antenna system, which is capable of providing orders-of-magnitude improvement in both radiated energy efficiency and bandwidth efficiency. Polar codes, the first codes that can provably achieve the capacity of symmetric binary-input discrete memoryless channels (B-DMCs), have become one of the most promising code candidates for 5G due to advantages in performance, complexity, and flexibility. In this overview paper, state-of-the-art research progress in these two areas will be summarized to open the discussion on some important to-be-solved problems and limitations, especially from the circuits-and-systems design perspective. This motivates the organization of this special session, which includes this overview paper and five technical papers. An outline of these five invited papers constructs the last part of this overview, sketching their targeted research problems, proposed methodologies and solutions, as well as the main contribution and results.