Deployment Issues for Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract: In this paper we examine a number of deployment issues which arise from practical considerations in massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We show both spatial correlation and line-of-sight (LOS) introduce an interference component to the system which causes non-orthogonality between user channels. Distributing the antennas into multiple clusters is shown to reduce spatial correlation and improve performance. Furthermore, due to its ability to minimize interference, zero forcing (ZF) precoding performs well in massive MIMO systems compared to matched filter (MF) precoding which suffers large penalties. However, the noise component in the ZF signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) increases significantly in the case of imperfect transmit channel state information (CSI).