Fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication systems employ beamforming technology using massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) to improve the reception quality and spectrum efficiency within a cell. Meanwhile, coordinated beamforming among multiple base stations is an effective approach to improving the spectrum efficiency at the cell edges, in which massive MIMO is deployed at geographically distant base stations and beamforming control is conducted in a cooperative manner. Codebook-based beamforming is a method for realizing multi-cell coordinated beamforming, in which each base station selects one of multiple beams that are predefined in a codebook. In codebook-based beamforming, it is important to design an efficient codebook that takes into account the beam allocation and the number of beams. In general, the larger the number of beams defined in a codebook, the more finely tuned the beam control can be and a greater improvement in spectrum efficiency can be expected. However, it requires a huge signal processing to optimize the beam combinations with a large number of beams by coordinated beamforming. This paper proposes a novel codebook design that efficiently assigns beam directions and widths in a vertical plane. Computer simulations showed that the proposed codebook performs as well as the conventional method while requiring fewer beam combinations.

To deal with the recent explosion of mobile data traffic, heterogeneous cellular networks, in which a large number of small cells are deployed in a macro-cell coverage area, are considered to be a promising approach. However, when a mobile terminal (MT) traveling at a high velocity moves through several small cells in a short period of time, the frequent handovers (HOs) that occur between small cells lead to a deterioration of user quality of experience. To avoid such HO problems, while improving the network capacity in the heterogeneous cellular network, it is effective to introduce an inter-layer HO control policy where MTs traveling at high velocities are connected to the macro-cell layer to reduce the number of HOs and MTs traveling at low velocities or which are stationary are connected to the small-cell layer for offloading traffic from the macro-cells to the small-cells. However, to realize such inter-layer HO control policy in the heterogeneous cellular network, it is crucial to estimate the velocity of each MT. Due to the technological constraints of MT velocity estimation based on the Global Positioning Systems (GPS), we focus on MT velocity estimation algorithms which do not require information provided by GPS. First, we discuss the issues of the existing MT velocity estimation algorithms and then focus on a MT velocity estimation algorithm based on a conventional Doppler spread detection using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Since few studies have evaluated Doppler spread based MT velocity estimation techniques for practical communication systems in actual radio propagation environments, we implement the MT velocity estimation algorithm to a Long Term Evolution (LTE) based experimental system, and perform its field experiments. Based on these experimental results we also evaluate the high or low velocity decision accuracy for the inter-layer HO control policy and show that good decision accuracy is achieved in both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) outdoor propagation environment. These results show its feasibility for practical mobile communication systems in actual radio propagation environments.

High-altitude platform stations (HAPSs) are recognized as a promising technology for coverage extension in the sixth generation (6G) mobile communications and beyond. The purpose of this study is to develop a HAPS system with a coverage radius of 100km and high capacity by focusing on the following two aspects: array antenna structure and user selection. HAPS systems must jointly use massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) and multiuser MIMO techniques to increase their capacity. However, the coverage achieved by a conventional planar array antenna is limited to a circular area with a radius of only tens of kilometers. A conventional semi-orthogonal user selection (SUS) scheme based on the orthogonality of channel vectors achieves high capacity, but it has high complexity. First, this paper proposes a cylindrical mMIMO system to achieve an ultra-wide coverage radius of 100km and high capacity. Second, this paper presents a novel angle-based user selection (AUS) scheme, where a user selection problem is formulated as a maximization of the minimum angular difference between users over all user groups. Finally, a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm (SA) for AUS is also proposed. Assuming an area with a 100km radius, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed cylindrical mMIMO system improves the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio by approx. 12dB at the boundary of the area, and it achieves approx. 1.5 times higher capacity than the conventional mMIMO which uses a planar array antenna. In addition, the results show that the proposed AUS scheme improves the lower percentiles in the system capacity distribution compared with SUS and basic random user selection. Furthermore, the computational complexity of the proposed SA is in the order of only 1/4000 that of SUS.

It is important to improve a cell-edge throughput of next generation mobile communication systems. Frequency reuse schemes such as three-cell reuse or fractional frequency reuse are suitable for achieving this goal. Another candidate is multi-link transmission; signals on different sub-carriers from adjacent base stations are received by a mobile. However, the orthogonality of these signals can collapse if a frequency offset between adjacent base stations is excessive; this loss triggers adjacent-channel interference. This paper proposes an interference canceller to solve this problem and confirms the effectiveness of the method through numerical analysis and computer simulations.

In next-generation mobile communications, it is important to improve the throughput of the cell edge as well as that of the whole cell. Multi-link transmission from two adjacent BSs has been studied for improving the throughput at the cell edge in OFDM-based cellular systems, which are major candidates for next-generation mobile communication systems. In multi-link transmission, an MS at a cell edge receives signals from both adjacent BSs by orthogonally multiplexing those signals in the frequency domain. Therefore, the cell-edge MS can utilize the frequency and power resources of both adjacent BSs, which improves the cell-edge throughput. However, when the received timing difference between the signals from both BSs exceeds the maximum permissible value, adjacent-channel interference is caused by the collapse of the orthogonality. In this paper, to resolve this issue, we propose a novel timing-offset interference canceller. To clarify the performance of the proposed canceller, this paper evaluates its performance with respect to the residual interference power and the BER by computer simulation.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, which is specified in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 8 and employs downlink multiple input multiple output (MIMO) transmission, is drawing attention as a promising next generation cellular mobile radio system due to its high spectral efficiency compared to the current High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) system. The authors performed a field trial of an LTE system that complies with 3GPP Release 8 in Kitakyushu-city, Fukuoka, Japan, as a specified ubiquitous district project promoted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan. This paper first summarizes the field trial. Next, it describes the overview of the field trial system and reports the field experiment results on the downlink 22 MIMO wireless transmission. Finally, it compares the field experimental results to laboratory experimental results obtained with a hardware channel simulator using the channel model based on Recommendation ITU-R P.1816.

Non-linear precoding (NLP) scheme for downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (DL-MU-MIMO) transmission has received much attention as a promising technology to achieve high capacity within the limited bandwidths available to radio access systems. In order to minimize the required transmission power for DL-MU-MIMO and achieve high spectrum efficiency, Vector Perturbation (VP) was proposed as an optimal NLP scheme. Unfortunately, the original VP suffers from significant computation complexity in detecting the optimal perturbation vector from an infinite number of the candidates. To reduce the complexity with near transmission performance of VP, several recent studies investigated various efficient NLP schemes based on the concept of Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) that applies successive pre-cancellation of inter-user interference (IUI) and offsets the transmission vector based on a modulo operation. In order to attain transmission performance improvement over the original THP, a previous work proposed Minimum Mean Square Error based THP (MMSE-THP) employing IUI successive pre-cancellation based on MMSE criteria. On the other hand, to improve the transmission performance of MMSE-THP, other previous works proposed Ordered MMSE-THP and Lattice-Reduction-Aided MMSE-THP (LRA MMSE-THP). This paper investigates the further transmission performance improvement of Ordered MMSE-THP and LRA MMSE-THP. This paper starts by proposing an extension of MMSE-THP employing a perturbation vector search (PVS), called PVS MMSE-THP as a novel NLP scheme, where the modulo operation is substituted by PVS and a subtraction operation from the transmit signal vector. Then, it introduces an efficient search algorithm of appropriate perturbation vector based on a depth-first branch-and-bound search for PVS MMSE-THP. Next, it also evaluates the transmission performance of PVS MMSE-THP with the appropriate perturbation vector detected by the efficient search algorithm. Computer simulations quantitatively clarify that PVS MMSE-THP achieves better transmission performance than the conventional NLP schemes. Moreover, it also clarifies that PVS MMSE-THP increases the effect of required transmission power reduction with the number of transmit antennas compared to the conventional NLP schemes.