Experimental Analysis of Concentrated versus Distributed Massive MIMO in an Indoor Cell at 3.5 GHz

This paper presents a measurement-based comparison between distributed and concentrated massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which are called D-mMIMO and C-mMIMO systems, in an indoor environment considering a 400 MHz bandwidth centered at 3.5 GHz. In both cases, we have considered an array of 64 antennas in the base station and eight simultaneously active users. The work focuses on the characterization of both schemes in the up-link, considering the analysis of the sum capacity, the total spectral efficiency (SE) achievable by using the zero forcing (ZF) combining method, as well as the user fairness. The effect of the power imbalance between the different transmitters or user terminal (UT) locations, and thus, the benefits of performing an adequate power control are also investigated. The differences between the C-mMIMO and D-mMIMO channel performances are explained through the observation of the structure of their respective measured channel matrices through parameters such as the condition number or the power imbalance between the channels established by each UT. The channel measurements have been performed in the frequency domain, emulating a massive MIMO system in the framework of a time-domain duplex orthogonal frequency multiple access network (TDD-OFDM-MIMO). The characterization of the MIMO channel is based on the virtual array technique for both C-mMIMO and D-mMIMO systems. The deployment of the C-mMIMO and D-MIMO systems, as well as the distribution of users in the measurement environment, has been arranged as realistically as possible, avoiding the movement of people or machines.