Downlink Transmission in FBMC-based Massive MIMO with Co-located and Distributed Antennas

In this paper, a practical precoding method for the downlink of filter bank multicarrier-based (FBMC-based) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is developed. The proposed method includes a two-stage precoder consisting of a fractionally spaced prefilter (FSP) per subcarrier for flattening/equalizing the channel across the subcarrier band, followed by a conventional precoder whose goal is to concentrate the signals of different users at their spatial locations. This way, each user receives only the intended information. We take note of the fact that channel reciprocity may not hold perfectly in practical scenarios due to the mismatch of radio chains in uplink and downlink. Additionally, channel state information (CSI) at the base station may not be perfectly known. These can lead to detrimental effects on the downlink precoder performance. We theoretically analyze the performance of the proposed precoder in the presence of imperfect CSI and channel reciprocity calibration errors. This leads to an effective method for compensating for these effects. Our study includes both cases of co-located (i.e., cell-based) and cell-free massive MIMO. Finally, we numerically evaluate the performance of the proposed precoder. Our results show that the proposed precoder leads to an excellent performance when benchmarked against orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).