Wireless backhaul of dense small cell networks with high dimension MIMO

Wireless backhaul is often the bottleneck of heterogeneous network with relay nodes especially when dense relay deployment is considered. Massive MIMO is a good candidate to improve the performance of wireless backhaul. With massive MIMO, MU-MIMO technique can be more effectively applied to multiplex transmission targeting multiple relays in the same resource. However, application of MU-MIMO is limited by available traffic and spatial separation of the relays. We investigate the application of virtual MIMO on the relay system so that multiple relays in the same cluster form a virtual MIMO system for higher dimension MIMO transmission. Evaluation is done to investigate the benefits of applying virtual MIMO on the wireless backhaul of a cluster based small cell networks.