Experimental Evaluation of A Novel Antenna Structure:Multi-Panel Massive MIMO

With evolution of wireless communication, the next generation (5G) cellular system emerged and aimed at providing three times higher spectrum efficiency compared with LTE-Advanced system for enhanced Mobile Broadband. Massive MIMO is considered as one of the most important technologies to achieve the purpose and its benefits have been proved by theoretical analysis and field trials. However, the antenna size and weight have become the bottlenecks on the deployment in the realistic network. To tackle this problem, a novel flexible antenna structure for massive MIMO, known as multi-panel massive MIMO, was proposed and attracted broad attention in 3GPP NR (New Radio). Currently the performance of the multi-panel massive MIMO is studied in literature by the numerical simulation, however the field measurements to characterize the actual performance of multi-panel massive MIMO have been scarce so far. In this article, we first present a detailed description of our developed multi-panel massive MIMO prototype and then provide our radiation pattern measurement results and field test results. These experimental measurement results not only justify the validity of the coverage beamforming pattern, but also demonstrate that the multi-panel massive MIMO can achieve significant throughout gain. Based on these measurement results, it can be seen that multi-panel massive MIMO will be a novel practical antenna array structure for massive MIMO flexible deployment in the next generation cellular systems.