11/12/21, 10:48 PM The Role of Massive MIMO in 5G.

Author: Michael | by Michael Wang | Medium

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Oct 23, 2018 · 6 min read

The Role of Massive MIMO in 5G

Author: Michael

An Illustration of Massive MIMO for 5G, Source: IEEE Spectrum

What Is Massive MIMO Technology?

MIMO stands for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output. While there are many layers of depth in MIMO technology, MIMO can essentially be
boiled down to one principle: MIMO spatial multiplexing is the simultaneous use of the same radio frequencies to transmit different signals. It
means that several transmitting antennas at a base station can transmit different signals and several receiving antennas at a device can
receive and divide them simultaneously.

Standard MIMO networks tend to use two or four antennas to transmit data and the same number to receive it. Massive MIMO, on the
other hand, is a MIMO system with an especially high number of antennas. Massive MIMO increases the number of transmitting antennas
(dozens or more than 100 elements) at a base station.

Massive MIMO offers two major innovations: 3D beanforming and MU-MIMO (multi-user MIMO).

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Beamforming is a traffic-signaling system for cellular basestations that identifies the most efficient data-delivery route to a particular user,
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and it reduces interference for nearby users in the process. At massive MIMO basestations, signal-processing algorithms plot the best
transmission route through the air to each user. Then they can send individual data packets in many different directions, bouncing them
off buildings and other objects in a precisely coordinated pattern. In brief, think massive MIMO as a massive 3D beanforming that
increases horizontal and vertical coverage capabilities.

Massive MIMO Matrix, Source: EETimes

MU-MIMO further expands the total capacity per basestation by enabling communication with multiple devices using the same resources,
creating a virtually unified device side. The simultaneous use of the antennas of multiple devices help achieve the formation of virtual
large-scale MIMO channels. The combination of these two innovations makes it possible to raise wireless transmission speed by increasing
the number of antennas at the base station without consuming more frequency bandwidth or increasing modulation multiple values.

Why Do We Need Massive MIMO for 5G?

Estimated by several researches, about 5% of service providers would start offering 5G wireless service, representing big progress from 5G
proofs of concepts (POCs) in 2018. 5G, as the next-generation cellular standard after 4G (LTE), has been defined across several global
standard bodies: ITU (International Telecommunication Union), 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project), ETSI (European
Telecommunications Standards Institute). The official ITU specification, International Mobile Telecommunications-2020 (IMT-2020),
targets maximum downlink and uplink throughputs of 20 Gbps and 10 Gbps, respectively, and latency below 5 ms (milliseconds) and
massive scalability.

5G will not be able to achieve IMT-2020 requirements, such as 20 Gbps, without some major breakthroughs. At this moment, it’s not yet
clear which technologies will do the most for 5G in the long run, but a few early favorites have emerged. The front runners include
millimeter waves, small cells, full duplex, beanforming…and of course, massive MIMO.

Telecoms have already been adopting massive MIMO on existing 4G LTE networks, especially TD-LTE (Time-Division LTE) networks (for
example, SoftBank in 2016 and China Mobile in 2017). However, FDD-LTE (Frequency-Division-Duplex LTE) massive MIMO comes later
because TD-LTE has the advantage of using the same frequency for both downlink and uplink, and the uplink channel quality information
could be used for the downlink as well. FDD-LTE, on the other hand, requires another radio’s resources to obtain the feedback information
that is neccessary to implement beanforming for the downlink communication. This indicates that FDD massive MIMO requires bigger
overhead and is not as efficient as TD-LTE massive MIMO. It wasn’t until 2018 that Verizon started massive MIMO trials of 96 antenna
elements.

With 5G up and coming, commercial networks almost certainly have to adopt massive MIMO, and a typical 5G massive MIMO plans are 64
or 128 arrays at 3.5GHz and more than 128 arrays at 28GHz or above.

What Are the Key Factors in Driving 5G’s Massive MIMO Adoption?

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11/12/21, 10:48 PM The Role of Massive MIMO in 5G. Author: Michael | by Michael Wang | Medium

Coverage:

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In general, 5G will use higher radio spectrums than 2G/3G/4G, including centimeter waves and millimeter waves such as 3.5GHz and
28GHz. Its radio propagation loss is much bigger than previous sub-1GHz and around 2GHz. Also, 5G radio propagation can be
strongly affected by the surrounding environment, such as building shadowing, reflection from walls, human bodies and rain
attenuation. This sensitivity would make massive MIMO’s coverage enhancement ability stand out.

Capacity:

As we have mentioned, both beamforming and MU-MIMO can increase single-user throughput and total network capacity per
basestation. Massive MIMO becomes far more practical at higher frequencies, such as those planned for many 5G deployments.

Early Differentiation:

Both 4G and 5G are mainly based on 3GPP standardization, and 5G service providers would have trouble differentiating its network
from other competitors (like today’s 4G landscape). However, at this junction of transition, adopting massive MIMO first could
potentially offer a better 5G service (than others) to consumers. The better user experience could lead to user migration, and with
proper marketing campaign, the migration could eventually held steady through the 5G period.

However, there are some obstacles on 5G’s path of adopting massive MIMO.

Huge Antenna:

General LTE base stations used to adopt 2x2 MIMO architecture, and these antenna elements have to be located at least a half
wavelength shifted to decrease antenna elements’ mutual coupling and multipath channel’s spatial correlation. In the case of 2.6GHz,
its wavelength is about 11 centimeters, so only about 5.5 centimeters distance (in other words, half the wavelength) between antenna
elements is desired. However, the more number of antenna elements are deployed, the bigger the antenna size will be. For example,
the maximum length of 128x128 massive MIMO on 2.6GHz could reach 1 meter, which obviously cannot fit existing sites. Also, the
weight could equal tens of kilograms or more, and a normal pole might not be able to handle the weight. Of course, the high-
functioning and heavy massive MIMO antennas can cost much more than existing ones, which could be an another factor postponing
its deployment.

Device Capability:

4x4 MIMO is the current mainstream technology with chipset support since 2016 (Qualcomm, Huawei’s HiSilicon, etc.). However, for
massive MIMO, including flexible precoding and MU-MIMO, to prove its merit, its device capability must be better than existing
Transmission Mode (TM) 3 and 4, as current TM3/TM4 support is not enough. TM3/TM4 devices cannot decode Channel State
Information Reference Signal (CSI-RS) and User Equipment-specific Reference Signal (UE-specific RS), and these devices cannot
provide feedback channel state information (which is necessary for massive MIMO beamforming) based on the measurement of CSI-
RS. TM9 and TM10 specified in 3GPP Release 10 and 11 can solve this issue, but there are only several devices that activate TM9
commercially up to now. Without devices’ support, service providers would likely delay its adoption…and device suppliers will likely
delay its support until massive MIMO is heading mainstream…creating a vicious spiral that could potentially kill 5G’s massive MIMO
adoption in its infancy.

Trade War:

The adoption of massive MIMO requires close collaboration between network equipment makers and device suppliers. The largest
network equipment makers happen to come from the co-target of current iteration of trade war: China. Huawei is trying to solve the
bottleneck of macro basestations and generally considered the leader in massive MIMO technology. The ongoing trade war and the
concern on national security would drive major telecoms away from Huawei, and have to wait for other non-China equipment makers
to provide their matre massive MIMO solutions.

Conclusion
Nonetheless, massive MIMO looks very promising for the future of 5G. In the long run, it’s very likely that service providers would find
massive MIMO the only path to achieve IMT-2020.

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11/12/21, 10:48 PM The Role of Massive MIMO in 5G. Author: Michael | by Michael Wang | Medium

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