Massive MIMO for energy-efficient communications

Massive MIMO (MaMi) is expected to become a key technology for 5G systems, providing a large capacity increase at reduced total radiated power. However, besides the radiated power, the power consumption of digital and analog circuits supporting individual antenna chains also has to be sufficiently low, given the large number of antennas. In this paper, we extend power consumption models for MaMi systems by evaluating different options such as precoder types, revisiting digital complexity estimates of different components, and incorporating the impact of improved designs, e.g., future analog RF frontends. We illustrate the role of the different components in the total system power for different MaMi scenarios.