Exploring High Tower Base Stations with Multi-User Massive MIMO for Rural Connectivity
Ammar El Falou, Mohamad-Slim Alouini

TL;DR
This paper investigates the use of high tower base stations with massive MIMO technology to provide affordable rural connectivity, focusing on uplink data rates and practical deployment considerations.
Contribution
It demonstrates the viability of HTBS with mMIMO for rural uplink connectivity and discusses techno-economic and non-technological challenges.
Findings
Good uplink data rates achieved at reasonable EIRPs
Coverage suitable for low-density rural areas
Recommendations for frequency and deployment locations
Abstract
The digital divide is a key issue worldwide. Almost 3 billion people, mainly in rural areas, are still not connected. In this paper, we explore the capability of high towers base station (HTBS) with massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) in offering low-cost rural connectivity. We previously showed the benefits of HTBS in the downlink. We focus in this work on the uplink (UL) where we compute the UL data rate per user for different values of transmit effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP). Our results show that the HTBS solution is viable as relatively good user UL rates are achieved with reasonable EIRPs. This is of high interest for covering rural areas, characterized by low population densities and a low number of active users, as the coverage is their main constraint, rather than the capacity as in urban areas. Techno-economical aspects such as the recommended frequency…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced MIMO Systems Optimization · Energy Harvesting in Wireless Networks · Full-Duplex Wireless Communications
MethodsBalanced Selection
