I wrote about "Distributed Massive MIMO using Ericsson Radio Stripes" after MWC 2019 here. I found it a very interesting concept and it will certainly take a few years before it becomes a reality.
Emil Björnson, Associate Professor at Linköping University have produced couple of videos on this topic. I am embedding both of them below for anyone who may be interested.
"A New Look at Cell-Free Massive MIMO" - based on technical paper from PIMRC 2019 on how to design Cell-free Massive MIMO systems that are both scalable and achieve high performance.
Worth noting the following about this video (based on video comments):
- There are some minor issues with the sudio
- Cell-free Massive MIMO is particularly for stadiums, streets, and places with many users or where it is hard to provide sufficient network quality with other methods.
- This concept is still 4-5 years away from being ready to be practically deployed. It should be ready for later part of 5G, probably 5.5G
"Reinventing the Wireless Network Architecture Towards 6G: Cell-free Massive MIMO and Radio Stripes" looks at the motivation behind Cell-free Massive MIMO and how it can be implemented in 6G using radio stripes.
Worth noting the following on this video (based on video comments):
- It may be possible that multiple frequency bands can be handled in the same radio stripe. If it is found to be possible then every other antenna processing unit could manage a different band.
- In principle, you can make the stripe as long as you need. But you probably need to divide it into segments since the power is supplied from one end of a stripe and it will only reach a limited distance (roughly up to 1 km). There are many implementation ideas and it remains to be seen what works out well in practice.
I am looking forward to see it work as it can solve coverage issues in many tricky scenarios.
Related Posts:
