Achieving Distributed MIMO Performance with Repeater-Assisted Cellular Massive MIMO

In what ways could cellular massive MIMO be improved? This technology has already been shown to bring huge performance gains. However, coverage holes and difficulties to transmit multiple streams to multi-antenna users because of insufficient channel rank remain issues. Distributed MIMO, also known as cell-free massive MIMO, might be the ultimate solution. However, while being a powerful technology, it is expensive to install backhaul, and it is a difficult problem to achieve accurate phase alignment for coherent multiuser beamforming on downlink. Another option is reflective intelligent surfaces -- but they have large form factors and require a lot of training and control overhead, and probably, in practice, some form of active filtering to make them sufficiently band-selective. We propose a new approach to densification of cellular systems, envisioning repeater-assisted cellular massive MIMO, where a large numbers of physically small and cheap wireless repeaters are deployed. They receive and retransmit signals instantaneously, appearing as ordinary scatterers in the channel but with amplification. We elaborate on the requirements of such repeaters, show that the performance of these systems could potentially approach that of distributed MIMO, and outline future research directions.
Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazine