Frequency Synchronization for Uplink Massive MIMO with Adaptive MUI Suppression in Angle Domain

In this paper, we develop a novel angle-domain adaptive filtering (ADAF)-based frequency synchronization method for the uplink of a massive multiple-input multiple-output multiuser network, which is applicable for users with either separate or overlapped angle-of-arrival (AoA) regions. For each user, we first introduce the angle-constraining matrix (ACM), which consists of a set of selected match-filter beamformers pointing to the AoAs of the interested user. Then, the adaptive beamformers can be acquired by appropriately designing the ADAF vectors. Such beamformer can achieve two-stage adaptive multiuser interference (MUI) suppression, i.e., inherently suppressing the MUI from non-overlapping users by ACM in the first stage and substantially mitigating the MUI from adjacent overlapping users by ADAF vectors in the second stage. For both separate and mutually overlapping users, the carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation and subsequent data detection can be performed independently for each user, which significantly reduces computational complexity. Moreover, ADAF is rather robust to imperfect AoA knowledge and side cluster of scatterers, making itself promising for multiuser uplink transmission. We also analyze the performance of CFO estimation and obtain an approximated closed-form expression of mean-squared error. The effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over the existing methods are demonstrated by numerical results.