Beyond Cellular: Emerging Network Perspectives in Multiuser and Cooperative MIMO (NWMIMO)

This workshop focuses on the design, performance analysis, and deployment of wireless schemes that employ cooperative communication among spatially dispersed antennas. These schemes have the potential to achieve improvements in sum spectral efficiencies and/or reliability. The scope encompasses both the forward and the reverse link. It includes physical layer aspects, such as encoder/receiver designs, training, mobility, and robustness issues, as well as higher-layer and system-level aspects, such as user association, scheduling, fairness, and QoS considerations. The scope also includes deployment issues, such as scalability, coexistence, and backward compatibility. Scope & Objectives Given the increasing demands for high-throughput high-QoS content delivery over wireless networks, resource-efficient methods are inherently needed in order to provide reliable transmission at the required high spectral efficiencies. A key set of technologies for designing such high-throughput high-reliability systems, referred to as MIMO techniques, rely on cooperative transmission from multiple transmit antennas to multiple receive antennas. A related promising approach takes antenna cooperation a step further and allows coding across multiple base stations, and/or across antennas that are spatially dispersed. Cooperative transmission across remote antenna units (RAUs) can yield benefits in the reverse and forward link of single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. These distributed antenna system (DAS) deployments also suggest a shift in paradigm from the base-station centric cellular framework to a "network" framework, whereby each user is served by a user-specific subset of spatially dispersed antennas rather than by a single RAU. Although early work in this area has shown that such deployments can promise large throughput gains, they also pose additional challenges at the physical layer as well as at higher layers. Evidently, the extent to which these challenges are addressed will have a direct impact on the actual benefits these schemes can offer with respect to their cellular counterparts. The scope of the proposed workshop includes resource-efficient techniques for cooperative communication across multiple BSs (or RAUs), their performance characteristics and their deployment challenges. The objective of this workshop is to further elucidate the benefits (in both the forward and the reverse link) of such techniques, as well as to investigate and propose designs that address some of the challenges that may arise in their deployment. Paper Submission and Format Authors are invited to submit high-quality papers describing original and previously unpublished contributions within the described scope of the workshop. Paper submissions should be prepared according to the PIMRC 2008 paper submission instructions. Specifically, papers need to be uploaded to the EDAS system. Papers should be in English, not exceeding 5 double-column pages (overlength pages will be charged for), and should follow IEEE paper templates available here. Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE Xplorer and will be orally presented at the workshop. Important Dates Paper submission deadline: closed Acceptance notification: May 15, 2008 Final manuscript: June 23, 2008 Workshop date: September 15, 2008 Tentative Program Plenary: "Information Theoretic Implications of Constrained Cooperation in Simple Cellular Models", Shlomo Shamai (Shitz), Osvaldo Simeone, Oren Somekh, Amichai Sanderovich, Benjamin M. Zaidel, and H. Vincent Poor Session 1: "Opportunistic Spectrum Sharing in MIMO systems", Samir Medina Perlaza,Merouane Debbah, Samson Lasaulce, and Jean-Marie Chaufray "Multi-Hop Enabled Orthogonalization in Distributed MIMO Network", Jorg Wagner, Marc Kuhn, and Armin Wittneben "A Multi-Cell Space-Time-Coded Transmission Scheme for Single Frequency", Kiran Rege, Krishna Balachandran, Joseph Kang, and Mehmet Kemal Karakayali "Evaluation of user throughput for MU-MIMO coordinated wireless network", Anass Benjebbour, Masashige Shirakabe, Yusuke Ohwatari, Junichiro Hagiwara, and Tomoyuki Ohya Session 2: "Code Construction for the Asynchronous Cooperative Broadcast Channel", Lina Mroueh, Oussama Damen, Stephanie Rouquette-Leveil, Ghaya Rekaya, and Jean-Claude Belfiore "Analysis of Cooperative MIMO Networks with Incomplete Channel State Information", Giuseppa Alfano, Augusto Aubry, Howard Huang, and Antonia Tulino "Downlink Overhead Reduction for Multi-Cell Cooperative Processing enabled Wireless Networks", Agisilaos Papadogiannis, Hans Bang, David Gesbert, and Eric Hardouin "Limited Feedback for Multi-Antenna Multi-user Communications with Generalized Multi-Unitary Decomposition", Wee Seng Chua, Chau Yuen, Yong Guan, and Francois Chin Review Process and Technical Program Committee The workshop includes a blend of invited papers and peer-reviewed papers handled by the NWMIMO Technical Program Committee.