Toward Extra Large-Scale MIMO: New Channel Properties and Low-Cost Designs

Extra large-scale multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) has been recognized as one of the potential development directions of massive MIMO. By employing even more antennas than massive MIMO in the fifth-generation era, extra large-scale MIMO can further exploit the spatial domain resources and enable ultra-high data rates, low latency communications as well as emerging applications, such as sensing and localization, in sixth-generation mobile communication systems. However, with the increase of the size of the antenna array, and the decrease of the distance between a user and the array, new channel properties, that did not manifest in conventional massive MIMO, start to kick in. Most importantly, existing research strategies pertaining to massive MIMO cannot be directly applied or simply extended to fit the extra large-scale MIMO case. Moreover, increasing the number of antennas will inevitably boost the total cost, which refers to not only the high hardware cost, but also the burden of vast processing and computations as well as the substantial training overhead. In this article, we make a survey on the state-of-the-art on the new channel properties of and low-cost designs for extra large-scale MIMO systems. Particularly, we pursue a mathematical analysis to explain why the new features appear and illustrate how they affect the system model. Furthermore, we summarize and compare the low-cost designs from various perspectives and give our suggestions from a practical deployment point of view.