Large Scale Field Experimental Trial of Downlink TDD Massive MIMO at the 4.5 GHz Band

The 5th generation of mobile communications system (5G) is nowadays expected to support very diverse applications, devices, and services such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and the Internet of things (IoTs). In order to meet the future requirements, new 5G candidate radio access technologies have been proposed and studied. For example, Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is an attractive technology to further improve the spectrum efficiency and to boost system capacity. This paper presents a large scale field experimental trial of downlink time division duplex (TDD) Massive MIMO using the developed 5G test bed at the 4.5 GHz band. Specifically, the system performance of multi-user (MU) Massive MIMO with different numbers of sets of user equipment (UEs) and spatial layers is investigated, including the impact of different inter-UE separations and UE deployments, which have not been well investigated compared to the previous studies. The experimental results show that the throughput performance for a wide UE separation linearly increases as the number of layers and UEs increases, while the performance improvement is diminished when inter-UE separation narrows. In addition, the maximum total user throughput of 11.29 Gbps, which corresponds to a spectrum efficiency of 79.82 bps/Hz/cell, was achieved with 24 layers. The results indicate that TDD Massive MIMO using the developed 5G test bed greatly improves the spectrum efficiency for large scale MU-MIMO.