What is Massive MIMO?

Multi-input Multi-output (MIMO) technology is the use of multiple receive and transmit antennas to establish a communications link between two, or more, communications systems with greater throughput than would be possible with a single antenna system. Massive MIMO, also known as full-dimension MIMO, hyper MIMO, very large MIMO, and is a subset of Large-Scale Antenna Systems (LCAS), is the use of a large number of antennas, tens, hundreds, and thousands, to dramatically increase the throughput and energy efficiency to a multitude of communications devices.

Massive MIMO is commonly seen as the solution to many of the challenges associated with upcoming 5G technologies, especially in extremely high traffic urban areas that also require many very high throughput connections. There are many benefits of massive MIMO technology compared to traditional base station antenna and radio hardware systems. These benefits include the use of small and easily mass-manufactured radio components and hardware, flexible and scalable systems that can be rapidly modified to serve changing conditions, robustness toward jamming, a simplified MAC layer, reduced communications latency, and other benefits.