Non-Stationarities in Extra-Large-Scale Massive MIMO

Massive MIMO, a key technology for increasing area spectral efficiency in cellular systems, was developed assuming moderately sized apertures. In this article, we argue that massive MIMO systems behave differently in large-scale regimes due to spatial non-stationarity. In the large-scale regime, with arrays of around 50 wavelengths, the terminals see the whole array but non-stationarities occur because different regions of the array see different propagation paths. At even larger dimensions, which we call the extra-large scale regime, terminals see a portion of the array and inside the first type of non-stationarities might occur. We show that the non-stationarity properties of the massive MIMO channel change several important MIMO design aspects. In simulations, we demonstrate how non-stationarity is a curse when neglected but a blessing when embraced in terms of computational load and multi-user transceiver design.