Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the most promising technologies for the next generation of wireless communication networks because it has the potential to provide game-changing improvements in spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). This monograph summarizes many years of research insights in a clear and self-contained way and provides the reader with the necessary knowledge and mathematical tools to carry out independent research in this area. Starting from a rigorous definition of Massive MIMO, the monograph covers the important aspects of channel estimation, SE, EE, hardware efficiency (HE), and various practical deployment considerations. From the beginning, a very general, yet tractable, canonical system model with spatial channel correlation is introduced. This model is used to realistically assess the SE and EE, and is later extended to also include the impact of hardware impairments. Owing to this rigorous modeling approach, a lot of classic “wisdom” about Massive MIMO, based on too simplistic system models, is shown to be questionable.

The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases, thus strong signal gains are achievable with little interuser interference. Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE. Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and interuser interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and energy-efficient antenna elements.

Imagine a coverage area with many wireless access points that cooperate to jointly serve the users, instead of creating autonomous cells. Such a cell-free network operation can potentially resolve many of the interference issues that appear in current cellular networks. This ambition was previously called Network MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) and has recently reappeared under the name Cell-Free Massive MIMO. The main challenge is to achieve the benefits of cell-free operation in a practically feasible way, with computational complexity and fronthaul requirements that are scalable to large networks with many users. We propose a new framework for scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems by exploiting the dynamic cooperation cluster concept from the Network MIMO literature. We provide a novel algorithm for joint initial access, pilot assignment, and cluster formation that is proved to be scalable. Moreover, we adapt the standard channel estimation, precoding, and combining methods to become scalable. A new uplink and downlink duality is proved and used to heuristically design the precoding vectors on the basis of the combining vectors. Interestingly, the proposed scalable precoding and combining outperform conventional maximum ratio processing and also performs closely to the best unscalable alternatives.

The rate and energy efficiency of wireless channels can be improved by deploying software-controlled metasurfaces to reflect signals from the source to destination, especially when the direct path is weak. While previous works mainly optimized the reflections, this letter compares the new technology with classic decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. The main observation is that very high rates and/or large metasurfaces are needed to outperform DF relaying, both in terms of minimizing the total transmit power and maximizing the energy efficiency, which also includes the dissipation in the transceiver hardware.

Cell-free Massive MIMO is considered as a promising technology for satisfying the increasing number of users and high rate expectations in beyond-5G networks. The key idea is to let many distributed access points (APs) communicate with all users in the network, possibly by using joint coherent signal processing. The aim of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive analysis of this technology under different degrees of cooperation among the APs. Particularly, the uplink spectral efficiencies of four different cell-free implementations are analyzed, with spatially correlated fading and arbitrary linear processing. It turns out that it is possible to outperform conventional Cellular Massive MIMO and small cell networks by a wide margin, but only using global or local minimum mean-square error (MMSE) combining. This is in sharp contrast to the existing literature, which advocates for maximum-ratio combining. Also, we show that a centralized implementation with optimal MMSE processing not only maximizes the SE but largely reduces the fronthaul signaling compared to the standard distributed approach. This makes it the preferred way to operate Cell-free Massive MIMO networks. Non-linear decoding is also investigated and shown to bring negligible improvements.

Multiple antenna technologies have attracted much research interest for several decades and have gradually made their way into mainstream communication systems. Two main benefits are adaptive beamforming gains and spatial multiplexing, leading to high data rates per user and per cell, especially when large antenna arrays are adopted. Since multiple antenna technology has become a key component of the fifth-generation (5G) networks, it is time for the research community to look for new multiple antenna technologies to meet the immensely higher data rate, reliability, and traffic demands in the beyond 5G era. Radically new approaches are required to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in these metrics. There will be large technical challenges, many of which are yet to be identified. In this paper, we survey three new multiple antenna technologies that can play key roles in beyond 5G networks: cellfree massive MIMO, beamspace massive MIMO, and intelligent reflecting surfaces. For each of these technologies, we present the fundamental motivation, key characteristics, recent technical progresses, and provide our perspectives for future research directions. The paper is not meant to be a survey/tutorial of a mature subject, but rather serve as a catalyst to encourage more research and experiments in these multiple antenna technologies.