Performance Improvement in Massive MIMO

System with Channel Coding

Amina N, Aysha Humaira S, Fathima Shehna, Nair Soumya Ajitkumaran and Jazir S 1
1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, ACE College of Engineering, Thiruvallam,
Trivandrum, Kerala
E-mail: soumya.ajitkumaran@acetvm.com

Abstract- In this paper we concentrate on

performance for Massive Multiple Input
Multiple Output (MIMO) with channel
coding and without channel coding wherein
the performance of Bit Error Rate (BER) of
both is compared. In the test setup, the Base
station is incorporated with 32 antennas
along with 32 User terminals with single
antenna providing a reliable
communication. The coded Massive MIMO
system for Channel coding adopted Low Figure 1. Evolution of Massive MIMO
Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes. The
setup is simulated using Matlab. The It is also used to improve the efficiency in
observed simulation produces a result which providing high-speed data for 4G and Long-
shows a better performance and lower BER Term Evolution (LTE) Figure 1. This makes the
for LDPC coded Massive MIMO system MIMO systems perform better in terms of data
than for the system without channel coding. rates and link reliability [1].

In the MIMO environment, different user

Index Terms- Massive MIMO, Channel
terminals are served by the base station (BS) on
Coding, LDPC codes the same frequency band. These terminals when
receiving the data stream, they not only receive
the data meant to them, but also overhear the
I. INTRODUCTION
data which are meant to the other users leading
to interference. Massive MIMO is one of the
The fastest growing segment of the
solution provided to this problem.
communication industry with high-speed high-
quality information exchange between movable
The Base Station (BS) antenna arrays in the
devices located anywhere in the world is
Massive MIMO system uses few hundred
through Wireless communication. The main
elements, simultaneously serving many tens of
challenge in wireless communication is that the
active terminals (users) using the same time and
transmitted signal suffers from fading and
interference before it reaches the receiver. The frequency resources. As in Figure 2, Massive
main objective in wireless communication is to MIMO aims to further enhance this (to 10 Gbps
increase data rate and improve transmission and more) using hundreds of antennas using
advances in parallel digital signal processing
reliability. Multiple-Input Multiple-Output
and high-speed electronics. Extra antennas help
(MIMO) addresses the solution against these
with focusing the transmission and reception of
problems. It helps improve the wireless access
signal energy into smaller regions of space.
to various numbers of applications such as Wi-
This brings improvements in throughput and
Fi, Wi-MAX, etc.
energy efficiency [2].

1
 Figure 3. Without Channel Coding

II. IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY

The implementation is done by using

MATLAB Stimulation Tool.

Block diagram shown in Figure 3 represents the

methodology of the implementation, where the
performance for Massive MIMO considering
32 antennas at the Base Station serving 32 users
terminals. The implementation is carried out by
Figure 2. Massive MIMO scenario generating data which are first modulated..The
symbols are transmitted over multiple
Channel coding is one of the prime factors in transmitters. These symbols travel through the
digital communication and data storage. It channel, which is being received at the receiver
improves the bit error rate, throughput of which later produces a data as same as the data
Massive MIMO systems which is to be input. The system is similar to that of the digital
deployed for 5G Wireless communication communication system.
networks. This can be done using the proper
channel encoder and decoder design,
concatenating error control codes. Among the
various types of codes in the communication
system, Low-density parity-check (LDPC)
codes have been widely used in various
communications systems, which provide
powerful error correction capability [8-9]. It is
well known that LDPC codes can be efficiently
designed by using the density evolution
algorithm [3].

Communication link error performance can

be improved through channel coding. Thus, the
proposed system concentrates on better
performance of Massive MIMO system using
Channel coding comparing with the system
without Channel coding [6]. The simulation
produces a result which shows a better
performance and lower BER for LDPC coded
Massive MIMO system making it more suitable
[4-5].
Figure 4. With Channel Coding
Block diagram shown in Figure 4 represents the
methodology of implementation using channel
coding. The implementation is carried out by
generating the bits which are first coded by Low
Density Parity Check (LDPC) channel coding

2
and is then modulated. The symbols are
transmitted over multiple transmitters. These
symbols travel through the channel involving
the AWGN and Rayleigh fading. The Rayleigh
fading is a statiscally model for the effecvt of
propogation environment on a radio signal
such as that used by the wireless devices. In the
given channel which is being received at the
receiver which later produces a data as same as
the data input.The received signal r can be
written as:
r=α*t+n (1)
where, α → fading amplitude
t → transmitted channel symbol
n → AWGN
Various factors such as environmental
changes,buildings, obstacles,etc in the real
time affect the channel with the variation of
time which results in the scattering of signals.
Thus, we assume the channel model to be
having a Rayleigh fading model, which seems
to be a reasonable channel model. In addition to
that, we assume an additive white Gaussian
noise (AWGN) channel model to represent a
noisy channel. The system model is represented
as:
y=Hx+N (2)
where H represents the Rayleigh channel in a
matrix form, consisting of all the channel
parameters corresponding to their channel path.
N represents an AWGN channel. The error
status of both the system is considered and
compared.
III. CHANNEL CODING
Channel coding, also called forward error
control coding (FECC), is a process of
detecting and correcting bit errors in digital
communication systems. Channel coding is
functioned both at the transmitter and at the
receiver. At the transmitter side, channel
coding is referred to as encoder, where extra
parity bits are added with the original data
before modulation [7]. At the receiver side,
channel coding is referred to as the decoder,
where it detect and correct errors.
A. Low-Density Parity Code
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are
a class of linear block error correction codes
(ECC) providing near-capacity performance.
They were invented by Robert Gallager in
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1962. However, these codes were neglected for
more than 30 years, since the hardware at that
time could not attain the requirements needed
by the encoding process [10]. With the
increased capacity of computers and the
development of relevant theories such as the
belief propagation algorithm and Turbo codes,
LDPC codes were rediscovered by Mackay and
Neal in 1996. In the last decade, researchers
have made great progress in the study of LDPC
codes.
A low-density parity-check (LDPC) code is
otherwise known as linear error correcting
code. It is a method of transmitting a message
over a noisy transmission channel. LDPC codes
are widely used in applications which require
reliable and highly efficient inorder to transfer
the information in the presence of corrupting
noise. There are two obvious characteristics for
LDPC codes:
• Parity-check: LDPC codes are represented
by a parity-check matrix H, where H is a
binary matrix that, must satisfy cH T= 0, where
c is a codeword.
• Low-density: H is a sparse matrix (i.e. the
number of ‘1’s is much lower than the number
of ‘0’s). It is the sparseness of H that
guarantees the low computing complexity.
Consider a massive MIMO system with nT
transmit antennas and nR receive antennas. A
K-bit information sequence b is encoded to a N-
bit LDPC codeword u with the code rate of R =
K/N. Then, N coded bits are modulated as Mo-
ary QAM symbols to be transmitted by nT
transmit antennas using a spatial multiplexing
over Nch channel uses. Note that nT symbols
are transmitted at each channel use resulting in
𝐍
𝑵𝒄𝒉 =
𝒏𝑻𝐥𝐨𝐠𝟐𝑴𝒐
The MIMO system at the lth channel use is
expressed as:
y(l) = H(l)x(l) + w(l) (3)
where l = 1, 2, _ _ _ , Nch and entries of w(l) are
independent and identically distributed zero-
mean circular symmetric complex white
Gaussian with variance of σ2, and entries of H(l)
are circular symmetric complex Gaussian with
zero mean and unit variance. The real-valued
representation of Equation (3) is written by:
 It is known that the BER is better for channel
y̅ (l) = H̅ (l) x̅ (l) + w̅ (l) (4) using coding compared with the channel
without coding.The simulation results for
The receiver of massive MIMO system with the 16x16 and 32x32 is as Figure 6 and 7.
real-valued representation given in Equation(4)
can be expressed by a bipartite graph shown in Here in Figure 6, considering 10dB BER range,
Figure 5. The receiver consists of a detector and for uncoded system the range is between is 10-2
a decoder which exchange messages with each to 10-1 whereas for the LDPC coded system the
other iteratively by joint detection and range is at 10-3. It can be seen that there is a
decoding. The detector is composed of Nch difference of 0.099 between both the systems.
detector nodes, DETl , l = 1, ..., Nch, while the
decoder is composed of N variable nodes, v1, ..., In Figure 7, considering 20dB BER range, the
vN, and N - K check nodes, c1, ... , cN-K . Each range of uncoded system is between 10-6 to
detector node DETl is composed of 2nR 10-5, whereas for LDPC coded system the range
observation nodes, o1(l), ... , o2nR(l), and 2nT is between 10-3 to 10-2. There is a difference of
middle nodes, m1(l) ,... ,m2nT(l), connected 0.009999 between both the systems.
through edges. Each middle node is connected
to log2√Mo variable nodes, where each real-
valued symbol is generated from log2√Mo bits.
We define variable super-nodes, v1,..., vNch,
each of which is a group of variable nodes
associated with symbols transmitted at each
channel use. Signals y̅(1), ..., y̅(Nch) received over
Nch channel uses are input to detector nodes
DET1, ..., DETNch , respectively.

Figure 6. nTx-16 , nRx-16

Figure 5. Receiver structure of LDPC coded

massive MIMO system .

IV. SIMULATION AND RESULTS

In this work, the results are compared for a 32

x 32 Massive MIMO using Channel coding and
without Channel coding. The symbols are Figure 7. nTx-32 , nRx -32
modulated using BPSK modulation technique.

4
Thus considering both the Figure 6 and Figure Codes and Convolution Codes Over AWGN
7 it can be seen that, the performance of BER Channel”, International Journal of Pure and
for LDPC is better when compared with Applied Mathematics Volume 114 No. 11
uncoded systems. 2017.

[7] Todd K. Moon (2005), “Error Correction

V. CONCLUSION
This paper provides a comparison of
performance based on the Channel coding in
Massive MIMO. The Bit Error Rate parameter
is a very important factor in communication
network. All the network needs a reduced BER
to make the communication more reliable. We
can see that, in the case of Massive MIMO
system, using channel code provides a
enhanced performance of BER count that
makes this technology more certain.
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