Royal Military College,
Kingston, Canada
By Dr. Mostafa Hefnawi, P.Eng., Royal Military College, Kingston-Canada
Several enabling technologies are being explored for the fifth-generation (5G) wireless systems and it is widely recognized that the amalgam of massive multiple-input-multiple-output (massive MIMO) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands (> 30 GHz) will be a key enabler. On one hand, mmWave bands are used to take advantage of their wider bandwidth. On the other hand, massive MIMO technologies will mitigate the severe propagation loss in the mmWave bands. Another advantage of operating massive MIMO at mmWave frequencies is that large-scale antenna arrays can be packed into small dimensions due to the very small wavelength. However, with large-scale MIMO, the conventional fully-digital beamforming schemes that requires one dedicated RF chain per antenna element imposes a large hardware complexity and power consumption to the system and becomes impractical. This has motivated research on hybrid beamforming as a practical solution that uses a combination of analog beamformers in the RF and digital beamformers in the baseband domains, with fewer RF chains than the number of transmit elements.
The talk will provide an overview of massive MIMO and their application in next-generation wireless systems such as heterogenous networks (cognitive small-cells, wireless backhauls) and will highlight various hybrid beamforming architectures.
Biography
Dr. Hefnawi is currently a professor and the Chair of Graduate Studies Committee at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Royal Military College of Canada (RMC). Dr. Hefnawi obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Laval University in 1998 and he is a licensed professional engineer in the province of Ontario. He is the founder and director of the Software Defined Radio Lab in the ECE department at RMC. He is a contributing author of several refereed journals, book chapters, and proceeding papers in the areas of multiuser MIMO, massive MIMO, cognitive radio, wireless sensor network, and cooperative MIMO.
