Optimal Low-Power Design of a Multicell Multiuser Massive MIMO System at 3.7 GHz for 5G Wireless Networks

Massive MIMO techniques are expected to deliver significant performance gains for the future wireless communication networks by improving the spectral and the energy efficiencies. In this paper, we propose a method to optimize the positions, the coverage, and the energy consumption of the massive MIMO base stations within a suburban area in Ghent, Belgium, while meeting the low power requirements. The results reveal that massive MIMO provides better performances for the crowded scenario where users’ mobility is limited. With 256 antennas, a massive MIMO base station can simultaneously multiplex 18 users at the same time-frequency resource while consuming 8 times less power and providing 200 times more capacity than a 4G reference network for the same coverage. Moreover, a pilot reuse pattern of 3 is recommended in a multiuser multicell environment to obtain a good tradeoff between the high spectral efficiency and the low power requirement.