To achieve Massive MIMO with much less antennas by nested placement

Abstract

Nested array-A new type of two dimensional arrays with sensors(antennas) on lattice was proposed these years. This paper designs a novel antenna placement scheme at base station based on 2-D nested array. We utilize the difference co-array, which is an important characteristic of nested array, to model and generate all antennas(virtual antennas) in the covariance matrix of channel(virtual channel) coefficients. Based on this fact and inferences, we also model a Massive MIMO antenna system with nested configuration and list all mathematics procedures to calculate its performance with achievable rate. A zero forcing detector is applied to this Massive MIMO system and the spectral efficiency is given at the end. The numeric result proves our mathematics derivation and also the feasibility in real world. What's more, given the same number of antennas, the proposed method could achieve higher sum-rate capacity and better spectral efficiency.