Analyzing Uplink SINR and Rate in Massive MIMO Systems Using Stochastic Geometry

Abstract: This paper proposes a stochastic geometry framework to analyze the SINR and rate performance in a large-scale uplink massive MIMO network. Based on the model, expressions are derived for spatial average SINR distributions over user and base station distributions with maximum ratio combining (MRC) and zero-forcing (ZF) receivers. We show that using massive MIMO, the uplink SINR in certain urban marco-cell scenarios is limited by interference. In the interference-limited regime, the results reveal that for MRC receivers, a super-linear (polynomial) scaling law between the number of base station antennas and scheduled users per cell preserves the uplink SIR distribution, while a linear scaling applies to ZF receivers. ZF receivers are shown to outperform MRC receivers in the SIR coverage, and the performance gap is quantified in terms of the difference in the number of antennas to achieve the same SIR distribution. Numerical results verify the analysis. It is found that the optimal compensation fraction in fractional power control to optimize rate is generally different for MRC and ZF receivers. Besides, simulations show that the scaling results derived from the proposed framework apply to the networks where base stations are distributed according to a hexagonal lattice.