Multi-cell Massive MIMO Beamforming in Assuring QoS for Large Numbers of Users

Massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) uses a very large number of low-power transmit antennas to serve much smaller numbers of users. The most widely proposed type of massive MIMO transmit beamforming is zero-forcing, which is based on the right inverse of the overall MIMO channel matrix to force the inter-user interference to zero. The performance of massive MIMO is then analyzed based on the throughput of cell-edge users. This paper reassesses this beamforming philosophy, to instead consider the maximization of the energy efficiency of massive MIMO systems in assuring the qualityof-service (QoS) for as many users as possible. The bottleneck of serving small numbers of users by a large number of transmit antennas is unblocked by a new time-fraction-wise beamforming technique, which focuses signal transmission in fractions of a time slot. Accordingly, massive MIMO can deliver better quality-of-experience (QoE) in assuring QoS for much larger numbers of users. The provided simulations show that the numbers of users served by massive MIMO with the required QoS may be twice or more than the number of its transmit antennas.