Massive MIMO interference coordination for 5G broadband access: Integration and system level study

Abstract Upcoming 5G systems are called to face a huge growth of mobile traffic compared to the current 4G technology. To meet this challenge, the Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (mMIMO) emerged as an essential and capable transmission technique, able to concurrently serve a large number of users, while guaranteeing a very high spectral efficiency. Moreover, some other additional approaches, like the Joint Spatial Division and Multiplexing precoding scheme and the multi-cell coordinated beamforming technique for interference reduction, could be used to further improve the overall system performance and reduce the mMIMO implementation complexity. Unfortunately, the current scientific literature does not provide a clear overview on how and in which conditions these mechanisms can be successfully harmonized, configured, and adopted in real 5G deployments. To bridge this gap, this paper deeply investigates the configuration and the integration of these promising transmission techniques. Moreover, it also evaluates, from the system level perspective, their behavior in different operating conditions. From one side, obtained results clearly show the performance gain that these new techniques offer with respect to the existing 4G technology. From another side, however, they also identify the scenarios where the proper combination of these emerging techniques is really fruitful for meeting the expected quality requirements defined for the 5G.