This last decade has been marked by a spectacular growth in the Wireless network industry that has become an indispensable means of our daily life. According to Cisco´s anual Visual Networking Index, Global IP traffic will tri`ple between 2017 and 2022, reaching 4.8 Zettabytes annually. The number of connected devices will be more tan three times the world population estemated in 2022 (7.9 billion inhabitants)
Massive MIMO in 5G.
As of today, the services offered for these Smart devices are no longer limted to voice transmisión and data navigation and transfer over Internet. New trends have emerged as:
- Internet of things (IoT) for industry, transport and utilities
- Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)
- Internet gaming
- Artificial intelligence as the basis to improve sevices
- Big data
- Data mining
- Smart homes and cities
- Connections between machines (M2M)
The explosión of simultaneously connected devices and the high volumen of data traffic carried by Wireless networks, will cause an exponential increase in the growing demand for connectivity linked to the different technologies listed above. Obviously, this will require compliance with such important characteristics as the increase in transfer speeds of data upload and download operations, the coverage, reliability and stability of Wireless communications.
To meet these unspottable demands, a new generation of Wireless networks has come to light, standardized as the Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile netwoks. However, the design of these new networks must take into account, in addition to the limitation of the available frequency spectrum, the highly variable state (intime, frequency and space) of each communication channel device. The information sent through this channel is inevitably damaged. Some of the causes of this deterioration are related to the attenuation due to the los of power thaa a signal of certain characterstics suffers when it spreads through a certain geographic enviroment, and in addition, other phenomena such as shading, multipath fading, atmospheric effects fading, difraction and refraction, delays, other attenuations, interferences and noise.
In order to fase all these obstacles, the 5G network has a combination of responsable technologies that will make any Smart device capable of sending and receiving data faster. One of the most relevant is Massive MIMO, which stands for Multiple Input Multiple Output, which has the ability and receive to increase simultaneous Wireless connections based on the number of antenas in the same bandwidth, exploiting the spatial diversity (SDMA) offered, with the objective of drastically increasing the total transmisión speed and satisfying the quality of service
Massive MIMO technology uses several docena of transmitinf and receivinf antenas instead of just a few as in MIMO technology. The fact of appealing to more antenas allows us to get more out of the transmisión channel without having to increase the frequency spectrum since this last one is a limited resource and is divided among Telecommunications operators. In order to enjoy this multi antena technology, the devices involved must have multiple antenas. Some manufacturers of communications equipment, such as Huawei or Ericson, have already developed Massive MIMO equipment, such as base stations that use up to 128 antennas. Some of the terminals that already have 4×4 MIMO technology are Samsung´s Galaxy S19, Google´s Píxel 3, Huawei´s Mate 20 Pro, OnePlus 6T or iPhone XS, among many others.