- Giga-MIMO is where massive MIMO meets AI
- It is already being promoted by ZTE
- Analyst Joe Madden thinks that Giga-MIMO may become part of the 6G standard
Giga-MIMO may sound like it should belong in Toho Studio’s list of Kaiju monsters, but it in fact refers to the next iteration of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna arrays for forthcoming 5G-Advanced — and even 6G — deployments.
There are already so-called massive MIMO 128 and 256 antenna element arrays underway from the likes of Ericsson, NEC and Nokia. The Ericsson 128 antenna element box, which is called the AIR 3255, has even recently been deployed by NTT DoCoMo in Toyko. The AIR 3255 operates in the 4.5 GHz band with 32 transmitters and 32 receivers and 128 antenna elements.
Chinese vendor ZTE, as well as other players, are now claiming that Giga-MIMO will be a suitable upgrade for the pre6G era. “By dramatically expanding ultra-large-scale antenna array capabilities, this technology creates a significantly more robust and reliable performance foundation for next-generation applications,” ZTE said on LinkedIn.
“This architectural change will be pretty universal, among all RAN vendors. Some people refer to this as ‘Giga-MIMO’, but ZTE appears to have added other features into that name,” said Mobile Experts analyst Joe Madden in an email to Fierce.
Giga-MIMO: An AI antenna
“We’re predicting some improvements to the average spectral efficiency of the radio, through AI/ML optimization of multiple aspects of the RAN. This is happening already, with 'Link Adaptation' in some of the baseband processing,” Madden added.
Over the next five years, the Mobile Experts research is predicting optimization at a system level — not just in the baseband processor — including beam co-ordination between multiple sites. “Note that this is likely to be a proprietary algorithm, implemented either by the RAN vendor or by an rApp in the network,” Madden said.
ZTE, Madden noted, is also referring to picosecond-level synchronization between multiple cell sites. This is to improve the ability to coordinate interference cancellation and joint transmission and reception in the network.
“This feature has a possibility of implementation as part of the 6G standard,” the analyst said. “As the committees meet over the next three years we will see whether they choose to lock this into the standard.”
Giga-MIMO may be disliked by telcos, which want to make it as easy and cheap as possible to deploy 6G, which is why many commentators think that 6G will use 5G standalone as its core network. “Hardware changes like [synchronization] will be unpopular with the telcos, so it may be implemented only in new frequency bands,” Madden concluded.