Single Carrier Modulation Resource Allocation for Massive MIMO with Virtual Antennas

Today's Massive MIMO cellular operation is dominated by orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. One of the advantages of OFDM is the flexibility available to the base station to carve up the available spectrum into resource blocks (RBs) that can operate adjacent to one another. Massive MIMO adds spatial multiplexing layers on top of the RBs, enabling the simultaneous operation of dozens of UEs. In this paper, we present a resource allocation scheme for cyclic prefixed single carrier modulation (CP-SCM) waveforms using virtual antennas in a massive MIMO time domain duplexed scenario. Resources are quantized into data streams, and each user can be assigned a variable number of simultaneous streams. This paper provides additional analysis for the initial description of multi-stream processing (MSP) for uplink detection and leverages the uplink MSP framework for efficient downlink precoding. MSP is compared with current OFDM-based modulations. We also introduce heterogeneous MSP, where CP-SCM and OFDM signals can be processed in the same MSP framework.