Massive MIMO: Explaining the Performance Gap Between Academia and Industry
Posted on February 9, 2023, by Pivotal Commware
Massive MIMO achieved a world spectral efficiency record of 145.6 bps/Hz at a university lab in 2018. Since then, it has realized less than 10% of this demonstration’s potential in real world deployments. This presentation explained why Massive MIMO has not Massively improved carriers’ spectral efficiency. In doing so, it also suggested a solution for improvement of MIMO performance — the engineered scattering environment. This topic has been hiding inside a number of proposed 6G technologies. However, there is no need to wait because such performance gains can be achieved today with existing technologies, pioneered at mmW, but applied to midband frequency ranges.
In his presentation, Eric J. Black, Ph.D. and CTO of Pivotal explained why Massive MIMO has not massively improved carriers’ spectral efficiency, and suggests a solution — Multipath as a Service (MPaaS) — to the low-quality scattering that fundamentally limits MIMO performance.
Read Eric's recently published series Single User MIMO. It Didn’t Work, but the Lab Results Were Amazing on our website: Part I, Part II, Part III.