Category Archives: News

Macrocell Massive MIMO at 4.5 GHz: Field Trials in Japan

This impressive experiment serves 23 terminals with 64 base station antennas, at 4.5 GHz carrier, with a reported total spectral efficiency in the cell of nearly 80 bps/Hz. Several of the terminals are mobile, though it is not clear how fast.

Merouane Debbah, Vice-President of the Huawei France R&D center, confirms to the Massive MIMO blog that this spectral efficiency was achieved in the downlink, using TDD and exploiting channel reciprocity. This comes as no surprise, as it is not plausible that this performance could be sustained with FDD-style CSI feedback.

Another piece of evidence, that the theoretical predictions of Massive MIMO performance are for real.

Massive MIMO in Mobile Environments

An impressive experiment, recently reported by colleagues at Univ. of Lund and Univ. of Bristol, shows TDD (reciprocity-based) Massive MIMO multiplexing to mobile terminals:

The interesting part starts at 2:48, with the terminals onboard cars. While it has been contested whether Massive MIMO can work in mobility (because of channel aging) this experiment confirms that it does — as predicted by theory for a long time. In fact, at 3.7 GHz carrier and with a slot length of 0.5 ms, the maximum permitted mobility (assuming a two-ray model with Nyquist sampling, and a factor-of-two design margin) is over 140 km/h. So the experiment is probably still not close to the physical limits.