English

Non-Stationarities in Extra-Large Scale Massive MIMO

Information Theory 2019-10-08 v2 Signal Processing math.IT

Abstract

Massive MIMO, a key technology for increasing area spectral efficiency in cellular systems, was developed assuming moderately sized apertures. In this paper, we argue that massive MIMO systems behave differently in large-scale regimes due to spatial non-stationarity. In the large-scale regime, with arrays of around fifty wavelengths, the terminals see the whole array but non-stationarities occur because different regions of the array see different propagation paths. At even larger dimensions, which we call the extra-large scale regime, terminals see a portion of the array and inside the first type of non-stationarities might occur. We show that the non-stationarity properties of the massive MIMO channel changes several important MIMO design aspects. In simulations, we demonstrate how non-stationarity is a curse when neglected but a blessing when embraced in terms of computational load and multi-user transceiver design.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.03085,
  title  = {Non-Stationarities in Extra-Large Scale Massive MIMO},
  author = {Elisabeth De Carvalho and Anum Ali and Abolfazl Amiri and Marko Angjelichinoski and Robert W. Heath},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03085},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:01:31.350Z