Massive MIMO Performance Evaluation Based on Measured Propagation Data

By Xiang Gao, Ove Edfors, Fredrik Rusek, Fredrik Tufvesson. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2014

541 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Massive MIMO, also known as very-large MIMO or large-scale antenna systems, is a new technique that potentially can offer large network capacities in multi-user scenarios. With a massive MIMO system, we consider the case where a base station equipped with a large number of antenna elements simultaneously serves multiple single-antenna users in the same time-frequency resource. So far, investigations are mostly based on theoretical channels with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) complex Gaussian coefficients, i.e., i.i.d. Rayleigh channels. Here, we investigate how massive MIMO performs in channels measured in real propagation environments. Channel measurements were performed at 2.6 GHz using a virtual uniform linear array (ULA), which has a physically large aperture, and a practical uniform cylindrical array (UCA), which is more compact in size, both having 128 antenna ports. Based on measurement data, we illustrate channel behavior of massive MIMO in three representative propagation conditions, and evaluate the corresponding performance. The investigation shows that the measured channels, for both array types, allow us to achieve performance close to that in i.i.d. Rayleigh channels. It is concluded that in real propagation environments we have characteristics that can allow for efficient use of massive MIMO, i.e., the theoretical advantages of this new technology can also be harvested in real channels.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc9fa92c30062d6e43629fd35489a39068e51ba4

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Citations in the corpus

Toward Massive MIMO 2.0: Understanding Spatial Correlation, Interference Suppression, and Pilot Contamination (2019, result): “Analogous observations can be made from the measurements reported in [15], [16].”
5G: A Tutorial Overview of Standards, Trials, Challenges, Deployment, and Practice (2017, background): “In contrast, an 8 × 4 dual polarized array can be accommodated in a 0.6 m × 0.4 m space and can spatially resolve users and form beams in 3D [118], [142].”
A Comprehensive Survey of Pilot Contamination in Massive MIMO—5G System (2016, background): “of the real channel in order to come out with a more realistic model [114].”
Massive MIMO Has Unlimited Capacity (2017, background): “The one-ring model for uniform linear arrays (ULAs) gives orthogonal support if the channels have non-overlapping angular support [10]–[12], but the ULA microwave measurements in [13] show that the angular support of practical channels is highly irregular and does not lead to orthogonal support.”
A Survey of 5G Channel Measurements and Models (2018, background): “Measurements in [24] and [25] were performed in a campus at 2.”
Massive MIMO for Maximal Spectral Efficiency: How Many Users and Pilots Should Be Allocated? (2014, background): “This is a theoretical model for non-line-of-sight propagation that is known to give representative results with both few and many BS antennas (see recent channel measurements reported in [21]).”
6G Wireless Systems: Vision, Requirements, Challenges, Insights, and Opportunities (2020, background): “However, as the dimensions increase even further, effects such as wavefront curvature due to scattering in the nearfield of the array, shadowing differences in different parts of the array [99], and beam squinting due to the nonnegligible run time of the signal across the array [100]”