5G Distributed Massive MIMO with Ultra-High Density Antenna Deployment in Low SHF Bands

Abstract

In order to tackle rapidly increasing traffic, dramatic performance enhancements in radio access technologies (RATs) are required for fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication system. In 5G, small/semi-macro cells using Massive MIMO (M-MIMO) with much wider bandwidth in higher frequency bands are overlaid on macro cell with existing frequency band. Moreover, high density deployment of small/semi-macro cell is expected to improve areal capacity. However, in low SHF band (below 6 GHz), antenna array size of M-MIMO is large so that it cannot be installed on some environments. Therefore, to improve system throughput on various use cases in 5G, we have proposed distributed Massive MIMO (DM-MIMO). DM-MIMO coordinates lots of distributed transmission points (TPs) that are located in ultra-high density (UHD). Furthermore, DM-MIMO uses various numbers of antenna elements for each TP. In addition, DM-MIMO with UHD-TPs can create user-centric virtual cells corresponding to user mobility, and design of flexible antenna deployment for DM-MIMO is applicable to various use cases. Then, some key parameters such as the number of the distributed TPs, the number of antenna elements for each TP, and proper distance between TPs, should be determined. This paper presents such parameters for 5G DM-MIMO with flexible antenna deployment under fixed total transmission power and constant total number of antenna elements. Computer simulations show that DMMIMO can achieve more than 1.9 times higher system throughput than an M-MIMO system using 128 antenna elements.