Fading in Reflective and Heavily Shadowed Industrial Environments With Large Antenna Arrays

One of the required communication solutions to support novel use cases, e.g., in industrial environments, for 5G systems and beyond is ultra-reliability low-latency communication (URLLC). An enabling technology for URLLC is massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), which with its large antenna arrays can increase reliability due to improved user separation, array gain and the channel hardening effect. Measurements have been performed in an operating factory environment at 3.7 GHz with a co-located massive MIMO array and a unique randomly distributed array. Channel hardening can appear when the number of antennas is increased such that the variations of channel gain (small-scale fading) is decreased and it is here quantified. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the channel gains then becomes steeper and its tail is reduced. This CDF is modeled and the required fading margins are quantified. By deploying a distributed array, the large-scale power variations can also be reduced, further improving reliability. The large array in this rich scattering environment, creates a more reliable channel as it approaches an independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) complex Gaussian channel, indicating that one can rethink the system design in terms of, e.g., channel coding and re-transmission strategies, in order to reduce latency. To conclude, massive MIMO is a highly interesting technology for reliable connectivity in reflective and heavily shadowed industrial environments.