Can Ultra Massive MIMO deliver Terabit/s Broadband Connectivity in 6G?

Emil Björnson, Associate Professor at Linköping University, Sweden, and Visiting Full Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden recently delivered a talk at 6G Flagship webinar. This was part of the 6G Research Visions Webinar Series which took place on Wednesday 4th November 2020, highlighting the key results of the expert group that prepared the White Paper on Broadband Connectivity in 6G.

So what is ultra-massive MIMO? This is defined in one of his earlier blog posts. Extremely Large Aperture Arrays is also known as holographic MIMO, large intelligent surfaces, and ultra-massive MIMO. The new terminologies are used to indicate the use of co-located arrays that are much larger (in terms of the number of antennas and the physical size) than what is currently considered by the industry when implementing Massive MIMO in 5G. In this case, the spatial correlation matrices must be computed differently than described in “Massive MIMO networks”, for example, to take near-field effects and shadow fading variations into consideration. However, once the spatial correlation matrices have been computed, then the same framework for channel estimation and computation of achievable rates is applicable.

Here is the video of just the selected part from the webinar but feel free to navigate to listen to the entire webinar.

All slides are available here and slides for this specific talk is here.

Related Blog Posts:

• The 3G4G Blog: Cell-free Massive MIMO and Radio Stripes
• 3G4G - Massive MIMO for 5G: How Big Can it Get? - Emil Björnson
• The 3G4G Blog: Distributed Massive MIMO using Ericsson Radio Stripes