Human and Machine Type Communications can Coexist in Uplink Massive MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Massive MIMO technology enables the coexistence of human and machine communication services in cellular networks by sharing resources efficiently, without additional spectrum or infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resource sharing scheme for MTC and HTC in Massive MIMO systems and analyzes its performance, showing significant improvements.

Findings

MaMIMO significantly improves coexistence performance

Shared resource scheme enables MTC and HTC to operate simultaneously

No additional spectrum or infrastructure needed for integration

Abstract

Future cellular networks are expected to support new communication paradigms such as machine-type communication (MTC) services along with human-type communication (HTC) services. This requires base stations to serve a large number of devices in relatively short channel coherence intervals which renders allocation of orthogonal pilot sequence per-device approaches impractical. Furthermore, the stringent power constraints, place-and-play type connectivity and various data rate requirements of MTC devices make it impossible for the traditional cellular architecture to accommodate MTC and HTC services together. Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MaMIMO) technology has the potential to allow the coexistence of HTC and MTC services, thanks to its inherent spatial multiplexing properties and low transmission power requirements. In this work, we investigate the performance of a single cell under a shared physical channel assumption for MTC and HTC services and propose a novel scheme for sharing the time-frequency resources. The analysis reveals that MaMIMO can significantly enhance the performance of such a setup and allow the inclusion of MTC services into the cellular networks without requiring additional resources.