Full-dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO) for next generation cellular technology

This article considers a practical implementation of massive MIMO systems [1]. Although the best performance can be achieved when a large number of active antennas are placed only in the horizontal domain, BS form factor limitation often makes horizontal array placement infeasible. To cope with this limitation, this article introduces full-dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO) cellular wireless communication system, where active antennas are placed in a 2D grid at BSs. For analysis of the FD-MIMO systems, a 3D spatial channel model is introduced, on which system-level simulations are conducted. The simulation results show that the proposed FD-MIMO system with 32 antenna ports achieves 2-3.6 times cell average throughput gain and 1.5-5 times cell edge throughput gain compared to the 4G LTE system of two antenna ports at the BS.