Massive MIMO Unlicensed: A New Approach to Dynamic Spectrum Access

Nowadays, the demand for wireless mobile services is copious and will continue increasing in the near future. Mobile cellular operators are therefore looking at the unlicensed spectrum as an economical supplement to augment the capacity of their soon-to-be overloaded networks. The same unlicensed bands are luring Internet service providers, venue owners, and authorities into autonomously setting up and managing their high-performance private networks. In light of this exciting future, enhancing the coexistence between multiple unlicensed technologies becomes a pivotal issue. In this article, we present the fundamentals and the main challenges behind massive MIMO unlicensed, a new approach for technology coexistence in the unlicensed bands, that is envisioned to boost spectrum reuse for a plethora of use cases.