Downlink Precoding for DP-UPA FDD Massive MIMO via Multi-Dimensional Active Channel Sparsification

In this paper, we consider user selection and downlink precoding for an over-loaded single-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in frequency division duplexing (FDD) mode, where the base station is equipped with a dual-polarized uniform planar array (DP-UPA) and serves a large number of single-antenna users. Due to the absence of uplink-downlink channel reciprocity and the high-dimensionality of channel matrices, it is extremely challenging to design downlink precoders using closed-loop channel probing and feedback with limited spectrum resource. To address these issues, a novel methodology – active channel sparsification (ACS) – has been proposed recently in the literature for uniform linear array (ULA) to design sparsifying precoders, which substantially reduces channel feedback overhead. Pushing forward this line of research, we aim to facilitate the potential deployment of ACS in practical FDD massive MIMO systems, by extending it from ULA to DP-UPA with explicit user selection and making the current ACS implementation simplified. To this end, by leveraging Toeplitz matrix theory, we start with the spectral properties of channel covariance matrices from the lens of their matrix-valued spectral density function. Inspired by these properties, we extend the original ACS using scalar-weight bipartite graph representation to the matrix-weight counterpart. Building upon such matrix-weight bipartite graph representation, we propose a multi-dimensional ACS (MD-ACS) method, which is a generalization of original ACS formulation and is more suitable for DP-UPA antenna configurations. The nonlinear integer program formulation of MD-ACS can be classified as a generalized multi-assignment problem (GMAP), for which we propose a simple yet efficient greedy algorithm to solve it. Simulation results demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed MD-ACS with greedy algorithm over the state-of-the-art methods based on the QuaDRiGa channel models.