High-Mobility Wideband Massive MIMO Communications: Doppler Compensation, Analysis and Scaling Laws

In this paper, we apply angle-domain Doppler compensation for high-mobility wideband massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) uplink communications. The time-varying multipath channel is considered between high-speed terminal and static base station (BS), where multiple Doppler frequency offsets (DFOs) are associated with distinct angle of departures (AoDs). With the aid of large-scale uniform linear array (ULA) at the transmitter, we design a beamforming network to generate multiple parallel beamforming branches, each transmitting signal pointing to one particular angle. Then, the transmitted signal in each branch will experience only one dominant DFO when passing over the time-varying channel, which can be easily compensated before transmission starts. We theoretically analyze the Doppler spread of the equivalent uplink channel after angle-domain Doppler compensation, which takes into account both the mainlobe and sidelobes of the transmit beam in each branch. It is seen that the channel time-variation can be effectively suppressed if the number of transmit antennas is sufficiently large. Interestingly, the asymptotic scaling law of channel variation is obtained, which shows that the Doppler spread is proportional to the maximum DFO and decreases approximately as <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1/\sqrt {M}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of transmit antennas) when <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is sufficiently large. The numerical results are provided to corroborate the proposed scheme.