Recently Björnson and Marzetta in their publication on Antenna Arrays [1] discussed five possible future research directions. In their opinion Massive MIMO is no longer a theoretical concept and it is already being adopted in the industry. It is not uncommon to find 64 element antenna arrays being deployed in wireless communication systems. So we now need to look beyond Massive MIMO or MaMIMO as it is popularly referred to. Here are three possible future research directions that we find most interesting.
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60 GHz Millimeter Wave Band – Seems Like a Free Lunch
Let us start by first listing down the advantages of the 60 GHz Millimeter Wave Band, a band spread between 57 GHz and 64 GHz. This unlicensed band was first released in the US in 2001 but with limited allowance for transmit power (EIRP of 40 dBm). Later on, in 2013, this limit was increased to allow for greater transmit power (EIRP of 82 dBm) and larger range. The higher EIRP can be achieved with an antenna gain of 51 dBi or higher (EIRP is simply the product of transmit power and antenna gain). But first the advantages:
- Unlicensed band means you do not have to pay for using the frequencies in this band.
- Wide bandwidth of 7 GHz allows high data rate transmissions. Remember Shannon Capacity Theorem?
- High atmospheric absorption resulting in greater path loss (up to 20 dB/km) and shorter range. This means lesser co-channel interference and higher reuse factor.
- Smaller antenna sizes allowing for multiple antennas to be put together in the form of an array providing high gain.
- This band is quite mature and electronic components are cheap and easily available.
Massive MIMO and Antenna Correlation
Some Background
In a previous post we calculated the Bit Error Rate (BER) of a Massive MIMO system using two different channel models namely deterministic and probabilistic. The deterministic channel model is derived from the geometry of the array (ULA in this case) and the distribution of users in the cell. Whereas probabilistic channel model assumes that the channel is flat fading and can be modeled, between each transmit receive pair, as a complex, circularly symmetric, Gaussian random variable with mean of zero and variance of 0.5 per dimension.
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