Hekaton: Efficient and Practical Large-Scale MIMO
Authors: Xiufeng Xie, Eugene Chai, Xinyu Zhang, Karthikeyan Sundaresan, Mohammad Amir Khojastepour, Sampath Rangarajan
Abstract
Large-scale multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems have the potential for multi-fold scaling of network capacity. The research community has recognized this theoretical potential and developed architectures [1,2] with large numbers of RF chains. Unfortunately, building the hardware with a large number of RF chains is challenging in practice. CSI data transport and computational overhead of MU-MIMO beamforming can also become prohibitive under large network scale. Furthermore, it is difficult to physically append extra RF chains on existing communication equipments to support such large-scale MU-MIMO architectures.