An Experimental Study of Massive MIMO Properties in 5G Scenarios

Three main characteristics of massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) are studied. The widespread use of these characteristics and their lack of validation motivates this paper based in measurements. First, we study the channel hardening when the number of antennas in the base station (BS) increases. Second, we focus on the channel vector orthogonality between two users. Third, we investigate the rank of the spatial covariance matrix. The data used for this paper have been obtained in two measurement campaigns with all real antennas (i.e., neither virtual arrays nor virtual users). The first one has 64 BS elements arranged in 3 configurations, and it serves 8 users with 2 antennas each. The second campaign has 128 BS elements, serving 2 users with 2 antennas each. Both campaigns include line-of-sight and nonline-of-sight scenarios, designed according to the future 5G deployment scenarios. We show the rate of channel hardening when the number of BS elements increases. We evaluate the sum rate of two users at specific distances between them. We observe the large angular spread occupied by the user.