Massive MIMO: ten myths and one critical question

By Emil Björnson, Erik G. Larsson, T. Marzetta. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2015

1,081 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Wireless communications is one of the most successful technologies in modern years, given that an exponential growth rate in wireless traffic has been sustained for over a century (known as Cooper's law). This trend will certainly continue, driven by new innovative applications; for example, augmented reality and the Internet of Things. Massive MIMO has been identified as a key technology to handle orders of magnitude more data traffic. Despite the attention it is receiving from the communication community, we have personally witnessed that Massive MIMO is subject to several widespread misunderstandings, as epitomized by following (fictional) abstract: “The Massive MIMO technology uses a nearly infinite number of high-quality antennas at the base stations. By having at least an order of magnitude more antennas than active terminals, one can exploit asymptotic behaviors that some special kinds of wireless channels have. This technology looks great at first sight, but unfortunately the signal processing complexity is off the charts and the antenna arrays would be so huge that it can only be implemented in millimeter-wave bands.” These statements are, in fact, completely false. In this overview article, we identify 10 myths and explain why they are not true. We also ask a question that is critical for the practical adoption of the technology and which will require intense future research activities to answer properly. We provide references to key technical papers that support our claims, while a further list of related overview and technical papers can be found at the Massive MIMO Info Point: http://massivemimo. eu.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a55aedd0d9e0a87d52f38de797b92388ef98510

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Citations in the corpus

Toward Massive MIMO 2.0: Understanding Spatial Correlation, Interference Suppression, and Pilot Contamination (2019, background): “There is a rich body of scientific papers that analyze Massive MIMO and a handful of well-cited overview articles [4], [9]– [11], but the vast majority make two simplifying assumptions:”
Massive MIMO Detection Techniques: A Survey (2019, background): “In addition, the implementation of smart cities has reached stages wherein a dense and heterogeneous set of devices positioned over the urban area generates Exabytes of data to be exchanged [1].”
Grant-Free Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for IoT: A Survey (2019, background): “, the number of users many fewer than the number of antennas [228].”
Survey on UAV Cellular Communications: Practical Aspects, Standardization Advancements, Regulation, and Security Challenges (2018, background): “This generally entails the need of performing complex signal processing tasks at the analog repeater during the channel estimation procedure [131]–[134].”
5G: A Tutorial Overview of Standards, Trials, Challenges, Deployment, and Practice (2017, background): “[118] as it gives a good balance between complexity and performance [119].”
Renew (2022, background): “As a result, the FDD operation of mMIMO was dubbed the critical open question [5].”
Massive MIMO is a Reality - What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays (2019, methodology): “…to the reciprocity-based beamforming advocated in the Massive MIMO literature [2], [3], where no prior information of the antenna positions/orientations is needed [12]; the BS simply estimates the channel from uplink pilots and uses it for beamforming without extracting any geometric features.”
Massive MIMO Systems for 5G and beyond Networks—Overview, Recent Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Direction (2020, methodology): “Massive MIMO is the advancement of contemporary MIMO systems used in current wireless networks, which groups together hundreds and even thousands of antennas at the base station and serves tens of users simultaneously [38,39].”
Millimeter Wave Communications for Future Mobile Networks (2017, methodology): “With 150 GHz of Short wavelength and narrow beamwidth : Contrary to signals at sub-6 GHz bands, the mmWave signal has much shorter wavelength, which facilitates packing a large number of antennas into an array of compact size [6], [7].”