The Benefit of Cooperation in the Context of Massive MIMO

Currently a lot of research concentrates on future 5G networks for mobile radio systems of the next generation. Options like Massive MIMO (mMIMO), cooperation based on coordination or joint transmission, user equipment (UE) assisted interference cancellation, and ultra dense deployment of small cells are under discussion to achieve significant gains with respect to spectral efficiency. Massive MIMO, i.e., a strong over provisioning of antennas versus served users, is often claimed to solve many complex issues like inter cell interference, multi user MIMO scheduling, coverage holes and capacity limits. In this paper, the tradeoffs between a pure mMIMO implementation versus the combination with different types of cooperation are investigated for indoor local area scenarios.