PhaseMO: A Universal Massive MIMO Architecture for Sustainable NextG

The rapid proliferation of devices and increasing data traffic in cellular networks necessitate advanced solutions to meet these escalating demands. Massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology offers a promising approach, significantly enhancing throughput, coverage, and spatial multiplexing. Despite its advantages, Massive MIMO systems often lack flexible software controls over hardware, limiting their ability to optimize operational expenditure (OpEx) by reducing power consumption while maintaining performance. Current software-controlled methods, such as antenna muting combined with digital beamforming and hybrid beamforming, have notable limitations. Antenna muting struggles to maintain throughput and coverage, while hybrid beamforming faces hardware constraints that restrict scalability and future-proofing. This work presents PhaseMO, a versatile approach that adapts to varying network loads. PhaseMO effectively reduces power consumption in low-load scenarios without sacrificing coverage and overcomes the hardware limitations of hybrid beamforming, offering a scalable and future-proof solution. We will show that PhaseMO can achieve up to 30% improvement in energy efficiency while avoiding about 10% coverage reduction and a 5dB increase in UE transmit power.