Densely Deployed Indoor Massive MIMO Experiment: From Small Cells to Spectrum Sharing to Cooperation

Area of Science:

• Electrical Engineering
• Telecommunications Engineering
• Computer Science

Background:

• Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) is a foundational 5G technology.
• It enhances spectral efficiency and capacity through increased antenna deployment.
• Precoding in massive MIMO enables co-channel interference cancellation across cells.

Purpose of the Study:

• Analyze the impact of inter and intra-cell interference suppression.
• Evaluate spectral efficiency, capacity, user fairness, and computational cost.
• Compare three simulated massive MIMO systems under varying cooperation levels.

Main Methods:

• Utilized experimental channel data from an indoor scenario.
• Simulated three distinct system configurations with different cooperation levels.
• Assessed performance metrics including spectral efficiency, capacity, user fairness, and computational cost.

Main Results:

• Cooperative systems with interference suppression offer high performance but require fairness management.
• Spectrum-sharing systems achieve 32% optimal capacity with 20% CPU cost per cell, but highest total cost.
• Independent cells with intra-cell suppression show higher spectral efficiency than cooperative systems without it.

Conclusions:

• Interference suppression is crucial for optimizing massive MIMO performance across different cooperation models.
• System design choices involve trade-offs between capacity, fairness, and computational efficiency.
• Further research into interference management strategies can unlock the full potential of 5G technologies.