The Norwegian startup company Super Radio has during the past year made several channel measurement campaigns for Massive MIMO for land-to-sea communications, within a project called MAMIME (LTE, WIFI and 5G Massive MIMO Communications in Maritime Propagation Environments). There are several other companies and universities involved in the project.

The maritime propagation environment is clearly different from the urban and suburban propagation environments that are normally modeled in wireless communications. For example, the ground plane consists of water, and the sea waves are likely to reflect the radio waves in a different way than the hard surface on land. Except for islands, there won’t be many other objects that can create multipath propagation in the sea. Hence, a strong line-of-sight path is key in these use cases.

The MAMIME project is using a 128-antenna horizontal array, which is claimed to be the largest in the world. Such an array can provide narrow horizontal beams, but no elevation beamforming – which is probably not needed since the receivers will all be at the sea level. The array consists of 4 subarrays which each has a dimension of 1070 x 630 mm. Frequencies relevant for LTE and WiFi have been considered so far. The goal of the project is to provide “extremely high throughputs, stability and long coverage” for maritime communications. I suppose that range extension and spatial multiplexing of multiple ships is what this type of Massive MIMO system can achieve, as compared to a conventional system.

A first video about the project was published in December 2017:

Now a second video has been released, see below. Both videos have been recorded outside Trondheim, but Kan Yang at Super Radio told me that further measurements outside Oslo will soon be conducted, with focus on LTE Massive MIMO.