MIMO and massive MIMO — Analysis for a local area scenario

The performance of centralized and distributed deployments of massive MIMO in an office building is analyzed both with and without cooperation. It is shown that using twice as many base station antennas as data streams provides most of the massive MIMO benefits. A simple transmission scheme achieves user fairness and operates close to a capacity upper bound. An example scheduling algorithm improves efficiency only for less than twice the number of base station antennas as data streams. The tradeoff between performance and cost for backhauling is evaluated by comparing cooperation of distributed base stations with a single central deployment.