Toshifumi Sato

DL MU-MIMO Field Trial with 5G Low SHF Band Massive MIMO Antenna

This paper describes our activities related to massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) for use in 5G mobile communication networks. To achieve capacity enhancement and low power consumption for 5G wireless access systems, massive MIMO has drawn attention as one of the key technologies. Our research focuses on the utilization of massive MIMO in the low super-high-frequency (SHF) band, which is expected to be used for 5G commercial bands relatively soon, and on spectrum efficiency enhancement by spatial multiplexing with a low SHF band massive MIMO antenna. The present work introduces a prototype low SHF band massive MIMO antenna (including 64 antenna elements per unit), reports on indoor DL multi-user (MU) MIMO field trials with the massive MIMO antenna, and presents the results of the field trials. From the field trials, we confirmed the validity of the prototype low SHF band massive MIMO antenna to achieve high capacity.