This paper presents the next evolution of FD-MIMO technology for beyond 5G, where antennas of the FD-MIMO system are placed in a distributed manner throughout the cell in a multi-cell deployment scenario. This system, referred to as Distributed FD-MIMO (D-FD-MIMO) system, is capable of providing higher cell average throughput as well as more uniform user experience compared to the conventional FD-MIMO system. System level simulations are performed to evaluate performance. Our results show that the proposed D-FD-MIMO system achieves 1.4-2 times cell average throughput gain compared to the FD-MIMO system. The insights of performance gain are provided. Hardware implementation challenges and potential standards impact are also presented.
@article{arxiv.1704.00647,
title = {Distributed FD-MIMO: Cellular Evolution for 5G and Beyond},
author = {Yeqing Hu and Boon Loong Ng and Young-Han Nam and Jin Yuan and Gary Xu and Ji-Yun Seol and Jianzhong and Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.00647},
year = {2017}
}