Experimental Exploration of Unlicensed Sub-GHz Massive MIMO for Massive Internet-of-Things

Abstract

IoT networks are getting overcrowded following the vast increase in number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and connections. Networks can be extended with more gateways, increasing the number of supported devices. However, as investigated in this work, massive MIMO has the potential to increase the number of simultaneous connections and moreover lower the energy expenditure of these devices. We present a study of the channel characteristics of massive MIMO in the narrowband unlicensed sub-GHz band. The goal is to support IoT applications with strict requirements in terms of number of devices, power consumption, and reliability. The assessment is based on experimental measurements using both a uniform linear and a rectangular array. Our study demonstrates and validates the advantages of deploying massive MIMO gateways to serve IoT nodes. While the results are general, here we specifically focus on static nodes. The array gain and channel hardening effect yield opportunities to lower the transmit power of IoT nodes while also increasing reliability. The exploration confirms that exploiting large arrays brings great opportunities to connect a massive number of IoT devices by separating the nodes in the spatial domain. In addition, we give an outlook on how static IoT nodes could be scheduled based on partial channel state information.

Keywords

• Channel measurements
• low-power wide-area networks
• massive MIMO
• Internet-of-Things
• sub-GHz
• test-bed and trials