A scalable architecture for massive MIMO base stations using distributed processing

Massive MIMO-systems have received considerable attention in recent years as an enabler in future wireless communication systems. As the idea is based on having a large number of antennas at the base station it is important to have both a scalable and distributed realization of such a system to ease deployment. Most work so far have focused on the theoretical aspects although a few demonstrators have been reported. In this work, we propose a base station architecture based on connecting the processing nodes in a K-ary tree, allowing simple scalability. Furthermore, it is shown that most of the processing can be performed locally in each node. Further analysis of the node processing shows that it should be enough that each node contains one or two complex multipliers and a few complex adders/subtracters operating at some hundred MHz. It is also shown that a communication link of some Gbps is required between the nodes, and, hence, it is fully feasible to have one or a few links between the nodes to cope with the communication requirements.