Large MIMO Systems: The Future of Wireless Communication

Large MIMO Systems (Massive MIMO Systems) refer to a radio communication system where the communicating terminals have large antenna arrays to achieve increased throughput, reliability and power efficiency. Although it has been known to theoretically achieve high performance goals, its practical application has been limited due to the underlying signal processing complexity (multi-user detection (MUD) and precoding).


In the last few years there has been a renewed interest due to the discovery of low complexity MUD and precoding methods. There are still many challenges, for example, acquiring accurate and timely channel estimates, effect of low cost hardware imperfections (since each antenna RF chain must be composed of cheap and imperfect components to save cost). Even with non-optimal low-complexity MUD it has been shown that Large MIMO Systems can achieve a ten fold increase in the average data throughput rates in LTE.


Here is a list of research groups involved in make Large MIMO Systems a reality.


• Prof. Erik G. Larsson, Communication Systems Division, Linkoping University, Sweden
• Prof. A. Chockalingam, Wireless Communication Lab., ECE, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
• ARGOS Massive MU-MIMO system: Rice University, TX, USA
• Dr. T. L. Marzetta, Communications and Signal Processing Research Group, Bell Labs., Alcatel-Lucent, NJ, USA
• Other groups: G. Caire (USC, USA), D. Gesbert (Eurecom, France), Geoffrey Li (GATECH, USA), A. Lee Swindlehurst (UCI, USA), M. Debbah (SUPELEC, France)
• Industry: Qualcomm Inc.