Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1313800
Each generation of wireless technology has used advances in antenna technology to help improve network speeds. 3G employed single-user MIMO, which leverages multiple simultaneous data streams to transmit data from the base station to a single user. Multi-user MIMO is a dominant technology in 4G systems—it assigns different data streams to different users, providing significant capacity and performance advantages over 3G (Figure 1). 5G will introduce massive MIMO, further increasing capacity and delivering data rates up to 20Gb/s (Figure 2). 5G Massive MIMO Explained The 5G mantra is to increase network capacity and data rates while minimizing operator expenses. Users also increasingly expect wireless data services to deliver wireline quality. 5G massive MIMO will help operators achieve these goals. It will deliver high data rates to many users, helping to increase capacity. It will support real-time multimedia services without requiring much additional spectrum. In addition, massive MIMO will reduce energy consumption by targeting signals to individual users utilizing beamforming, a technique that focuses the signal from multiple antennas into a single strong beam. Spatial Multiplexing and Massive-MIMO Benefits Massive-MIMO technology uses large antenna arrays (typically comprising 64 dual-polarized, but at a minimum 16, array elements) to exploit spatial multiplexing (Figure 3). Spatial multiplexing delivers multiple parallel streams of data within the same resource block. By expanding the total number of virtual channels, it increases capacity and data rates without additional towers and spectrum. | 23 | Figure 2: The evolution of MIMO in wireless technology generations will ultimately lead to the use of massive MIMO for 5G. Figure 3: Various benefits are associated with massive MIMO, such as spatial multiplexing.