I have recorded a popular science video that explains how a cell-free network architecture can provide major performance improvements over 5G cellular networks, and why radio stripes is a promising way to implement it: If you want more technical details, I recommend our recent survey paper “Ubiquitous Cell-Free Massive MIMO Communications“. One of the authors, … Continue reading Cell-free Massive MIMO and Radio Stripes
The new Cell-Free Massive MIMO concept has its roots in the classical Network MIMO concept, and has also been given many other names over the years (e.g., coordinated multipoint). When I started my research on the topic in 2009, the standard assumption was that a set of base stations were jointly transmitting to a set … Continue reading Centralized Versus Distributed Processing in Cell-Free Massive MIMO
Cell-free massive MIMO is likely one of the technologies that will form the backbone of any xG with x>5. What distinguishes cell-free massive MIMO from distributed MIMO, network MIMO or cooperative multi-point (CoMP)? The short answer is that cell-free massive MIMO works, it can deliver uniformly good service throughout the coverage area, and it requires … Continue reading Scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO
Conventional mobile networks (a.k.a. cellular wireless networks) are based on cellular topologies. With cellular topologies, a land area is divided into cells. Each cell is served by one base station. An interesting question is: shall the future mobile networks continue to have cells? My quick answer is no, cell-free networks should be the way to … Continue reading Cell-Free Massive MIMO: New Concept
In what ways could we improve cellular-massive-MIMO based 5G? Well, to start with, this technology is already pretty good. But coverage holes, and difficulties to send multiple streams to multi-antenna users because of insufficient channel rank, remain issues. Perhaps the ultimate solution is distributed MIMO (also known as cell-free massive MIMO). But while this is … Continue reading Rethinking Wireless Repeaters
Several 6G-related edited books have recently been published, which highlights the fact that the 6G-related research has now progressed for at least five years. Although the standardization is yet to begin, we know quite well which new technology components will be on the agenda. This does not mean that everything that is being researched will … Continue reading Book chapters about 6G technology
The way that mobile communication networks are designed changed dramatically with the advent of 5G. In the past, it was all about utilizing large bandwidths and deploying many base stations. Nowadays, we are instead equipping each base station and smartphone with multiple antennas, which enables us to use signal processing algorithms to improve signal strength, … Continue reading New book: Introduction to Multiple Antenna Communications and Reconfigurable Surfaces