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Massive MIMO and the ‘Death of the Small Cell’

November 24, 2015

By Ernest Worthman

November 24, 2015 — I have to chuckle at some of the off-the-wall statements companies or individuals make. This may also come under the heading of “you have got to be kidding me.”

I recently read a story that lead off with “Could Massive MIMO make small cells useless?” The story quotes Tom Marzetta, Co-Head of FutureX Massive MIMO project at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, as saying “You don’t need small cells if you have massive MIMO. They’re useless.”

Marzetta believes the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas are the answer to the long-term problems small cells were designed to address. Hmmm…interesting perspective. Simply put, I see massive MIMO as just tangent of DAS.

For the record, Massive MIMO is the term used for vastly increasing the number of antennas in a base station past the current number 8X8, which classified as MIMO. DoCoMo has already pushed the number to 64X64. Theoretically, each user could get their own beam.

According to Marzetta, Massive MIMO removes need for small cells because “its superior power control can give uniformly good service throughout the cell so it’s, more or less, eliminated or will eliminate, the problem of what do you do with people with low SNIRs on the edge of the cell.”

Ok, that makes some sense. But there are times when running a cable and tacking on an antenna is just not practical, or cost effective. And there could be any number of reasons you don’t want a permanent radiator somewhere.

He also thinks that small cells end up being a “helper” to massive MIMO. He presents a scenario that goes something like this.

“So the idea is you have deployed a Massive MIMO cellular system and now for certain areas of your cell you want to provide extra high throughput. You could do that with Massive MIMO if you cranked up the number of antennas, but quite possibly a more economical thing would be to deploy one or more small cells in strategic locations, and the idea is these small cells would operate in exactly the same band of frequencies at the same time as does the massive MIMO system.”

There is more, but you get the picture. With all due respect, Mr. Marzetta, even if you are the creator of the term, Massive MIMO, it is still just another DAS platform. Once the novelty of Massive MIMO wears off, small cells will still be in the thick of it.

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