5G - MU MIMO                             Home : www.sharetechnote.com

 

 

 

 

 

What is MU-MIMO ?

 

MU-MIMO stands for Multi User MIMO. It means Performing MIMO for more than 2 UEs simultaneously as illustrated below. This is not a new concept. We have MU-MIMO in current LTE (TM5) and WLAN (802.11ad). However, the scale of MU-MIMO will be much larger and deployment will also be more common. As far as I experienced, I haven't seen any case where TM5 is really used in current LTE live network. In case of 802.11ad, the distance between UE and transmitter antenna is designed to be very short comparing to 5G network. So real implementation of MU-MIMO for 5G will be much more challenging.

 

 

How challenging it would be to implement MU-MIMO ? The answer would be different depending on many factors. Even with the same number of users and same number of Tx/Rx antenna, there can be different mode of antenna allocation as illustrated below. There can be several factors to be considered in MU-MIMO implementation as follows.

  • How many UE should be covered ?
  • How many Tx antenna and Rx antenna will be used ?
  • What kind of Reciever design (Equalizer design) will be used ?
  • What kind of Precoding Algorithm will be used ?