Massive MU-MIMO Technology Tested to Increase Spectrum Capacity

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by Michelle Choi of Lease Advisors

Current telecommunications technology is constantly improving. With every generation of wireless network, carriers make improvements to meet data demand, speeds increase, and new capabilities and applications of mobile networks arise. Cell towers, with a few antennas per base station, have been the backbone of the industry, standing as points of reception and transmission of data on radio airwaves. Today’s top-of-the-line 4G wireless networks’ base stations have the capacity to communicate with up to four users at a time on a given frequency. What if the capacity and efficiency of the spectrum increased by a factor of 1,000?

Researchers at Rice University have won a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct the most extensive research of wireless technology in this capacity to date. The research would use base stations that accommodate 100 antennas or more to send data to users. One principal researcher, Lin Zhong, said, “Early tests of many-antenna technology… suggest that wireless carriers could use this technology to serve many times more data than can be served with today’s 4G networks.” The multi-antenna technology is called “massive multi-user, multi-input, multi-output,” or massive MU-MIMO. 

Zhong’s Efficient Computing Group has developed ArgosNet—named after the many-eyed giant in Greek mythology—as a testbed for the technology. ArgosNet will include up to six programmable base stations and the research team will be able to reconfigure the 100+ antennas to emulate cell tower base stations. It would be able to beam information directly to users simultaneously on the same frequency, as opposed to current technology that divides its time and frequency to send small amounts of data to each user every few milliseconds.

The technology should significantly improve current networks which struggle to meet demand. A 2014 Cisco student reported that the average network increased speeds from 1,387 kilobits per second to 1,683 kbps from 2013 to 2014, but that’s nowhere near the growth needed. And the massive MU-MIMO research also faces hurdles in the required computing power needed to track users and form and re-form beams in real time. There is a question of co-implementation with current and future deployment of base stations and the trade-offs between power, cost, size, and performance.

NSF Program Director Thyaga Nandagopal said, “Large-scale multi-user MIMO technology is a key enabler in meeting the 1,000x data challenge—that of increasing spectrum efficiency by a factor of 1,000 when compared to current 4G data networks… This project will advance this research to the next level by addressing the system-level challenges that can hinder the realization of this technology’s full potential.”

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