A review on massive MIMO Antennas for 5G communication systems on challenges and limitations

Abstract

High data rate transfers, high-definition streaming, high-speed internet, and the expanding of the infrastructure such as the ultra-broadband communication systems in wireless communication have become a demand to be considered in improving quality of service and increase the capacity supporting gigabytes bitrate. Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems technology is evolving from MIMO systems and becoming a high demand for fifth-generation (5G) communication systems and keep expanding further. In the near future, massive MIMO systems could be the main wireless systems of communications technology and can be considered as a key technology to the system in daily lives. The arrangement of the huge number of antenna elements at the base station (BS) for uplink and downlink to support the MIMO systems in increasing its capacity is called a Massive MIMO system, which refers to the vast provisioning of antenna elements at base stations over the number of the single antenna of user equipment. Massive MIMO depends on spatial multiplexing and diversity gain in serving users with simple processing signal of uplink and downlink at the BS. There are challenges in massive MIMO system even though it contains numerous number of antennas, such as channel estimation need to be accurate, precoding at the BS, and signal detection which is related to the first two items. On the other hand, in supporting wideband cellular communication systems and enabling low latency communications and multi-gigabit data rates, the Millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology has been utilized. Also, it is widely influenced the potential of the fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) standard. This study was specifically review and compare on a few designs and methodologies on massive MIMO antenna communication systems. There are three limitations of those antennas were identified to be used for future improvement and to be proposed in designing the massive MIMO antenna systems. A few suggestions to improve the weaknesses and to overcome the challenges have been proposed for future considerations