Massive Machine Type Communications Uplink Traffic: Impact of Beamforming at the Base Station

As the number of machine type communications increases at an exponential rate, new solutions have to be found in order to deal with the uplink traffic. At the same time, new types of Base Stations (BS) that use a high number of antennas are being designed, and their beamforming capabilities can help to separate signals that have different angles of arrivals. In this paper, we consider a network where a BS serves a high number of nodes that lacks a receive chain, and we analyze the evolution of the outage probability as a function of the number of antennas at the BS. We then study the effect of an angle offset between the main beam and the desired node's direction in order to provide realistic results in a beam-switching scenario.