Wireless networks face a big, often un-acknowledged challenge of optimizing power consumption, as we connect more users, and even more devices. Each new device in the network adds more load on the base stations, which would need to put more antennas or spectrum to handle the device, as evident towards the push to utilize 1000s of antennas in Massive MIMO, or opening up of new spectrum bands in nextG. Hence it will be a gargantuan task to interface these billions of devices while not increasing the already worse carbon footprint, and not polluting the overcrowded spectrum.
To achieve sustainable growth, we need to break the existing spectrum efficiency vs energy efficiency tradeoff, where MIMO systems, with high energy footprint stemming from massive number of antennas needing their own interfacing RF chain hardware, and on the other end, we have lower-energy single antenna systems requiring only 1 RF chain but with users in different spectrum chunks. In GreenMO, we show how a wider-bandwidth single RF chain can be virtualized over a large number of antennas with fast switching antenna arrays, to enable massive MIMO beamforming and serve multiple users in same spectrum chunk. This lowers the energy footprint of MIMO systems while still keeping high spectrum efficiency. Please checkout more details in our paper.
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