GreenMO: Virtualized User-proportionate MIMO

Abstract

With the turn of new decade, wireless communications face a major challenge on connecting many more new users and devices, at the same time being energy efficient and minimizing its carbon footprint. However, the current approaches to address the growing number of users and spectrum demands, like traditional fully digital architectures for Massive MIMO, demand exorbitant energy consumption. The reason is that traditionally MIMO requires a separate RF chain per antenna, so the power consumption scales with number of antennas, instead of number of users, hence becomes energy inefficient. Instead, GreenMO creates a new massive MIMO architecture which is able to use many more antennas while keeping power consumption to user-proportionate numbers. To achieve this GreenMO introduces for the first time, the concept of virtualization of the RF chain hardware. Instead of laying the RF chains physically to each antenna, GreenMO creates these RF chains virtually in digital domain. This also enables GreenMO to be the first flexible massive MIMO architecture. Since GreenMO's virtual RF chains are created on the fly digitally, it can tune the number of these virtual chains according to the user load, hence always flexibly consume user-proportionate power. Thus, GreenMO paves the way for green and flexible massive MIMO. We prototype GreenMO on a PCB with eight antennas and evaluate it with a WARPv3 SDR platform in an office environment. The results demonstrate that GreenMO is 3x more power-efficient than traditional Massive MIMO and 4x more spectrum-efficient than traditional OFDMA systems, while multiplexing 4 users, and can save upto 40% power in modern 5G NR base stations.