Category Archives: News

Massive MIMO at the World Cup

Massive MIMO supports an order of magnitude higher spectral efficiency than legacy LTE networks. The largest gains come from spatial multiplexing of many users per cell, thus these gains can only be harvested when there are many users requesting data at every given millisecond, which requires larger traffic loads than you might think since many seemingly continuous user applications only send data sporadically.

For this reason, I used to say that outdoor musical festivals, where a crowd of 100,000 people gather to see their favorite bands, would be a first deployment scenario for Massive MIMO. This is fairly similar to what now has happened: The Russian telecom operator MTS has deployed more than 40 state-of-the-art LTE sites with Massive MIMO functionality in seven cities where the 2018 FIFA World Cup in football is currently taking place. The base stations are deployed to cover the stadiums, fan zones, airports, train stations, and major parks/squares; in other words, the places where huge crowds of football fans are expected.

In the press release, Andrei Ushatsky, Vice President of MTS, says:

Ericsson AIR 6468 base station array with 64 antennas, which is deployed in Russia

“This launch is one of Europe’s largest Massive MIMO deployments, covering seven Russian cities, and is a major contribution by MTS in the preparation of the country’s infrastructure for the global sporting event of the year. Our Massive MIMO technology, using Ericsson equipment, significantly increases network capacity, allowing tens of thousands of fans together in one place to enjoy high-speed mobile internet without any loss in speed or quality.”

While this is one of the first major deployments of Massive MIMO, more will certainly follow in the coming years. More research into the development and implementation of advanced signal processing and resource management schemes will also be needed for many years to come – this is just the beginning.

Three Highlights from ICC 2018

Three massive-MIMO-related highlights from IEEE ICC in Kansas City, MO, USA, this week:

  1. J. H. Thompson from Qualcomm gave a keynote on 5G, relaying several important insights. He stressed the fundamental role of Massive MIMO, utilizing reciprocity (which in turn, of course, implies TDD). This is a message we have been preaching for years now, and it is reassuring to hear a main industry leader echo it at such an important event. He pointed to distributed Massive MIMO (that we know of as “cell-free massive MIMO“) as a forthcoming technology, not only because of the macro-diversity but also because of the improved channel rank it offers to multiple-antenna terminals. This new technology may enable AR/VR/XR, wireless connectivity in factories and much more… where conventional massive MIMO might not be sufficient.
  2. In the exhibition hall Nokia showcased a 64×2=128 Massive MIMO array, with fully digital transceiver chains, small dual-polarized path antennas, operating at 2.5 GHz and utilizing reciprocity – though it wasn’t clear exactly what algorithmic technology that went inside. (See photographs below.) Sprint already has deployed this product commercially, if I understood well, with an LTE TDD protocol. Ericsson had a similar product, but it was not opened, so difficult to tell exactly what the actual array looked like. The Nokia base station was only slightly larger, physically, than the flat-screen-base-station vision I have been talking about for many years now, and along the lines that T. Marzetta from Bell Labs had already back in 2006. Now that cellular Massive MIMO is a commercial reality… what should the research community do? Granted there are still lots of algorithmic innovation possible (and needed), but …. Cell-free massive MIMO with RF over fiber is the probably the obvious next step.
  3. T. Marzetta from NYU gave an industry distinguished talk, speculating about the future of wireless beyond Massive MIMO. What, if anything at all, could give us another 10x or 100x gain? A key point of the talk was that we have to go back to (wave propagation) physics and electromagnetics, a message that I very much subscribe to: the “y=Hx+w” models we typically use in information and communication theory are in many situations rather oversimplified. Speculations included the use of super-directivity, antenna coupling and more… It will be interesting to see where this leads, but at any rate, it is interesting fundamental physics.

There were also lots of other (non-Massive MIMO) interesting things: UAV connectivity, sparsity… and a great deal of questions and discussion on how machine learning could be leveraged, more about that at a later point in time.

30% Discount on “Massive MIMO Networks” Book

The hardback version of the massive new book Massive MIMO Networks: Spectral, Energy, and Hardware Efficiency (by Björnson, Sanguinetti, Hoydis) is currently available for the special price of $70 (including worldwide shipping). The original price is $99.

This price is available until the end of April when buying the book directly from the publisher through the following link:

https://www.nowpublishers.com/Order/BuyBook?isbn=978-1-68083-985-2

Note: The book’s authors will give a joint tutorial on April 15 at WCNC 2018. A limited number of copies of the book will be available for sale at the conference and if you attend the tutorial, you will receive even better deal on buying the book!

Holographic Beamforming versus Massive MIMO

Last year, the startup company Pivotal Commware secured venture capital (e.g., from Bill Gates) to bring its holographic beamforming technology to commercial products. Despite the word “holographic”, this is not a technology focused on visual-light communications. Instead, the company uses passive electronically steered antennas (PESAs) that are designed for radio-frequencies (RFs) in the micro- and millimeter-wave bands. It is the impedance pattern created in the distribution network over the array that is called a “hologram” and different holograms lead to beamforming in different spatial directions. The company reportedly aims at having commercial products ready this year.

Will the futuristic-sounding holographic beamforming make Massive MIMO obsolete? Not at all, because this is a new implementation architecture, not a new beamforming scheme or spatial multiplexing method. According to the company’s own white paper, the goal is to deliver “a new dynamic beamforming technique using a Software Defined Antenna (SDA) that employs the lowest C-SWaP (Cost, Size, Weight, and Power)“. Simply speaking, it is a way to implement a phased array in a thin, conformable, and affordable way. The PESAs are constructed using high volume commercial off-the-shelf components. Each PESA has a single RF-input and a distribution network that is used to vary the directivity of the beamforming. With a single RF-input, only single-user single-stream beamforming is possible. As explained in Section 1.3 in my recent book, such single-user beamforming can improve the SINR, but the rate only grows logarithmically with the number of antennas. Nevertheless, cost-efficient single-stream beamforming from massive arrays is one of the first issues that the industry tries to solve, in preparation for a full-blown Massive MIMO deployment.

The largest gains from multiple antenna technologies come from spatial multiplexing of many users, using a Massive MIMO topology where the inter-user interference is reduced by making the beams narrower as more users are to be multiplexed. The capacity then grows linearly with the number of users, as also explained in Section 1.3 of my book.

Can holographic beamforming be used to implement Massive MIMO with spatial multiplexing of tens of users? Yes, similar to hybrid beamforming, one could deploy an array of PESAs, where each PESA is used to transmit to one user. Eric J. Black, CTO and founder of Pivotal Commware, refers to this as “sub-aperture based SDMA“. If you want the capability of serving ten users simultaneously, you will need ten PESAs.

If the C-SWaP of holographic beamforming is as low as claimed, the technology might have the key to cost-efficient deployment of Massive MIMO. The thin and conformable form factor also makes me think about the recent concept of Distributed Large Intelligent Surface, where rooms are decorated with small antenna arrays to provide seamless connectivity.

I Never Thought It Would Happen So Fast

I never thought it would happen so fast. When I started to work on Massive MIMO in 2009, the general view was that fully digital, phase-coherent operation of so many antennas would be infeasible, and that power consumption of digital and analog circuitry would prohibit implementations for the foreseeable future. More seriously, reservations were voiced that reciprocity-based beamforming would not work, or that operation in mobile conditions would be impossible.

These arguments, it turned out, all proved to be wrong. In 2017, Massive MIMO was the main physical-layer technology under standardization for 5G, and it is unlikely that any serious future cellular wireless communications system would not have Massive MIMO as a main technology component.

But Massive MIMO is more than a groundbreaking technology for wireless communications: it is also an elegant and mathematically rigorous approach to teaching wireless communications. In the moderately-large number-of-antennas regime, our closed-form capacity bounds become convenient proxies for the link performance achievable with practical coding and modulation.

These expressions take into account the effects of all significant physical phenomena: small-scale and large-scale fading, intra- and inter-cell interference, channel estimation errors, pilot reuse (also known as pilot contamination) and power control. A comprehensive analytical understanding of these phenomena simply has not been possible before, as the corresponding information theory has too complicated for any practical use.

The intended audiences of Fundamentals of Massive MIMO are engineers and students. I anticipate that as graduate courses on the topic become commonplace, our extensive problem set (with solutions) available online will serve as a useful resource to instructors. While other books and monographs will likely appear down the road, focusing on trendier and more recent research, Fundamentals of Massive MIMO distills the theory and facts that will prevail for the foreseeable future. This, I hope, will become its most lasting impact.

To read the preface of Fundamentals of Massive MIMO, click here. You can also purchase the book here.

Wireless Communications with UAVs: Theory and Practice

Our recent guest post about the combination of Massive MIMO and drones has received a lot of interest on social media. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for wireless communications is certainly an emerging topic that deserves further attention!

While the previous blog post focused on Massive MIMO aspects of UAV communications, other theoretical research findings are reviewed in this tutorial by Walid Saad and Mehdi Bennis:

You can also check out this tutorial by Rui Zhang.

Furthermore, the team of the ERC Advanced PERFUME project, lead by Prof. David Gesbert, has recently demonstrated what appears to be the world’s first autonomous flying base station relays. This exciting achievement is demonstrated in the following video: