What Is Massive MIMO?
Understand the components of massive MIMO (Multi-Input Multi-Output) and how it builds upon MIMO by employing a large antenna array. Explore how massive MIMO integrates with other wireless communications techniques such as hybrid beamforming, MU-MIMO, mmWave, small cells, and ray tracing. Learn how to build, test, and analyze massive MIMO systems using MATLAB® and Simulink® products for wireless communications. See how to use the antenna Array Designer app and Sensor Array Analyzer app to prototype and configure your massive MIMO system.
Published: 25 Oct 2021
Massive MIMO is a multi antenna wireless communication technology that employs a very large number of antenna elements to improve performance. In this video, we will explore the fundamental components of massive MIMO alongside related technology, such as beamforming, multi-user MIMO, millimeter wave, and ray tracing. We will also show how MATLAB and its wireless communications products can be used to build, test, and analyze massive MIMO as part of your wireless communications system design.
Massive MIMO is a specific type of MIMO system that uses tens, hundreds, or even thousands of antennas in an antenna array. Massive MIMO enables more spatially focused communication, which improves the spectral and energy efficiency of the wireless system. It exploits the fundamental MIMO concepts, such as beamforming, spatial multiplexing, and diversity. For these reasons, it is emerging as the technology used in 5G wireless systems.
Small cells are base stations that cover a short range, typically used in urban and indoor environments. They are used alongside massive MIMO in 5G to provide high throughput in dense environments. Multi-user MIMO is related to massive MIMO since it uses spatial multiplexing to simultaneously communicate with multiple users under the same time frequency. Combined with massive MIMO, multi-user MIMO can greatly improve cell throughput.
The large number of antennas employed in massive MIMO leads to a need for more amplifiers. This becomes an issue as an increase in amplifiers drives up the cost and power requirements of your system. Hybrid beamforming is typically used to partition the beamforming into analog and digital dimensions and therefore reduce the cost and energy complexity. RF transmissions and millimeter wave are part of the 5G standard.
At these frequencies, do the path loss, the signal power drops quickly, and the range of transmission is substantially reduced. As a result, millimeter wave transmissions usually leverage large antenna arrays together with beamforming to boost signal power. Ray tracing is a popular technique for channel modeling and link level analysis, especially for millimeter wave frequencies. Beamforming with massive MIMO systems results in narrow and focused beam patterns.
As a result, these focused beams are best modeled using ray tracing methods. Using ray tracing enables designers to include the effects of terrain and 3D buildings into account while simulating RF propagation in indoor and outdoor scenarios. As a result, you can optimize non light of site links with beam steering. The task of designing antennas and arrays for massive MIMO systems become more interactive using MATLAB apps.
Using the antenna array designer app, you can visualize and design different massive MIMO array configurations and configure the array to meet your performance specifications. To learn more about how massive MIMO is applied to wireless system design, explore the wireless communications solutions page.