Argos | Practical Many-Antenna MU-MIMO - EU-Vietnam Business Network (EVBN)

Extreme MU-MIMO

The Argos project pushes MU-MIMO to its limits, scaling up the number of antennas in wireless systems to a point previously thought impossible. This enables us to achieve enormous capacity and power gains, and discover the true real-world limits of MU-MIMO.

Challenges

Building a many-antenna base station is non-trivial. Scaling up baseband processing, clock
distribution, transmission synchronization, and channel estimation raises serious system challenges. Moreover, the cost, size, and power consumption of the base station limit the practicality of the many-antenna approach. Our work has already revealed many new research challenges on every level of the architecture.

Results

We have built three generations of many-antenna, or Massive MIMO, base stations. Our fundamental systems research reveals, solves, and optimizes many challenges unique to scaling up the number of base station antennas and multi-user spatial streams. By collecting and publishing realtime channel traces we reveal how Massive MIMO behaves and performs in the real world, helping guide system design. Our many-antenna architecture is able to improve spectral capacity and energy efficiency manyfold simultaneously.