How Much Will Tiny IoT Nodes Profit from Massive Base Station Arrays?

In this paper we study the benefits that Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices will have from connecting to a massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) base station. In particular, we study how many users that could be simultaneously spatially multiplexed and how much the range can be increased by deploying massive base station arrays. We also investigate how the devices can scale down their uplink power as the number of antennas grows with retained rates. We consider the uplink and utilize upper and lower bounds on known achievable rate expressions to study the effects of the massive arrays. We conduct a case study where we use simulations in the settings of existing IoT systems to draw realistic conclusions. We find that the gains which ultra narrowband systems get from utilizing massive MIMO are limited by the bandwidth and therefore those systems will not be able to spatially multiplex any significant number of users. We also conclude that the power scaling is highly dependent on the nominal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the single-antenna case.