RadioWeaves for Extreme Spatial Multiplexing in Indoor Environments

TL;DR

RadioWeaves is a novel indoor massive MIMO deployment paradigm where distributed wall-mounted antennas significantly improve user separation and capacity, enabling high data rates with low power consumption.

Contribution

This paper introduces RadioWeaves, a new distributed antenna deployment method for indoor massive MIMO that enhances spatial separation and capacity over traditional co-located setups.

Findings

RadioWeaves achieves better user separation than conventional deployments.

It provides high data rates with lower transmit power.

Distributed deployment reduces the impact of grating lobes.

Abstract

With the advances in virtual and augmented reality, gaming applications, and entertainment, certain indoor scenarios will require vastly higher capacity than what can be delivered by 5G. In this paper, we focus on massive MIMO for indoor environments. We provide a case study of the distributed deployment of the antenna elements over the walls of a room and not restricting the antenna separation to be half the wavelength. This is a new paradigm of massive MIMO antenna deployment, introduced under the name RadioWeaves. We investigate different antenna deployment scenarios in line of sight communication. We observe that the RadioWeaves deployment can spatially separate users much better than a conventional co-located deployment, which outweighs the losses caused by grating lobes and thus saves a lot on transmit power. Through simulations, we show that the RadioWeaves technology can provide high rates to multiple users by spending very little power at the transmitter compared to a co-located deployment.