China Mobile and Huawei take another small step with Massive MIMO

China Mobile and Huawei have jointly announced the completion of the second phase of Massive MIMO research, a project with the objective of 1.09 Gbps cell throughput.

The field trials, focused on 4.5G Evolution in which spatial multiplexing of Massive MIMIO, used on commercial UEs, with the pair claiming they had achieved 1 Gbps cell throughput with 20 MHz TDD spectrum.

Huawei believes such a breakthrough will go a long way in aiding the development of 3D beamforming, accurate channel calibration, intelligent orthogonalization, advanced power distribution, and other technologies to improve efficiencies on the network.

The trial is another positive step forward in addressing congestion of mobile networks, which is becoming a much more prominent challenge considering trends in the video space. Massive MIMO has been touted as one of the most viable opportunities to reduce network strain in recent years, primarily due to the network efficiencies it offers.

Huawei has stated the commercial deployment of Massive MIMO currently reaches 720 Mbps cell throughput on a 20 MHz bandwidth. 720 Mbps is six to seven times the spectral efficiency what would be expected with a traditional base station, and should this trial prove to be transferrable to the real world, it would certainly be another positive step forward.