Friday 26 February 2021

Samsung and Ericsson Talks Massive MIMO


Massive MIMO is a fascinating topic. First is that there is no end to learning about it and secondly, the more information I put out, the more hunger people have about it. In the recent months there have been quite a few product announcements on the topic so we thought, why not do a blog post on it. 

Before we start, why not look at Massive MIMO and Beamforming. Mpirical has a short and sweet video explaining it. It is embedded below.

The video discusses four main topic areas: Beamforming vs Spatial Multiplexing, Beam Creation and Steering, Massive MIMO and finally MIMO Panel Antennas.

Now that we have refreshed the concept, let's look at what the product announcements were. 

The first was this blog post by Ericsson on 'How to build high-performing Massive MIMO systems' where they talked about how Ericsson has mastered the Art and Science of Massive MIMO to both unleash the full capacity benefits and extend the coverage of the new 5G mid-band spectrum - bringing outstanding user experience today, and setting the stage for the advanced applications of tomorrow.

The post starts with the 101 of radio physics, then talks about “Outsmarting” physics with Massive MIMO and Beamforming and finally it talks about the secret sauce in Ericsson AAS (Advanced Antenna Systems). The tweet below shows a practical Massive MIMO antenna and how it works.

In addition, Ericsson announced an "ultra-light Massive MIMO radios and RAN Compute baseband solutions." You can read all about it on their Massive MIMO page here and in the Tweet below.

The second was a press release by Samsung announcing Massive MIMO Roadmap in New Whitepaper, which is available here.

The following video shows world's 1st commercial 5G Massive MIMO Radio by Samsung

As the deployments start ramping up, we will see more product announcements on these. The main challenge that needs solving is the huge amount of power consumption. Probably a year or two before we see a breakthrough.

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