Massive MIMO at night: On the operation of massive MIMO in low traffic scenarios

For both maximum ratio transmission (MRT) and zero forcing (ZF) precoding schemes and given any specific rate requirement the optimal transmit power, number of antennas to be used, number of users to be served and number of pilots spent on channel training are found with the objective to minimize the total consumed power at the base station. The optimization problem is solved by finding closed form expressions of the optimal transmit power and then search over the remaining discrete variables. The analysis consists of two parts, the first part investigates the situation when only power consumed in the RF amplifiers is considered. The second part includes both the power consumed in the RF amplifiers and in other transceiver circuits. In the former case having all antennas active while reducing the transmit power is optimal. Adaptive scheme to switch off some of the antennas at the base stations is found to be optimal in the latter case.