Massive MIMO’s Path Ahead: Sky High Scalability, Intelligent Control, and AI/ML

Trusty old MIMO is becoming Massive MIMO and is expected to continue into the future two decades of networking, but it will have to rise to many challenges. Massive MIMO must evolve to interwork with thousands of antenna elements while managing power in Internet of Things applications, evolving hardware, ever lower latency, emerging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, and intelligence at the edge, while security is an ever-present concern. What is entailed as it is determined whether technology can meet the envisioned future and what does the path ahead involve? Known technology gaps are in the areas of efficient receiver architecture, power efficiency, and CMOS. Three Massive MIMO subject matter experts discuss the challenges, and also the path to solutions in beamforming algorithms, resource management, computationally efficient channel estimation approaches, simultaneous multiple transmit/receive beams, and new deep learning techniques.