Scalable Massive MIMO

摘要

Techniques are disclosed relating to massive MIMO communications. In some embodiments, a base station is configured to dynamically adjust the number of processing elements used for MIMO signal estimation (e.g., the number of MIMO RX chains used for parallel processing). In some embodiments, the number of processing elements may be based on the number of antennas currently being used, the number of spatial streams, interconnect throughput thresholds, sampling rate, etc. In some embodiments, the base station includes configurable MIMO cores configured to dynamically switch between MIMO signal estimation techniques, e.g., on a per-symbol basis. In some embodiments, the base station includes configurable linear decoders configured to separately multiply input matrices and combine or refrain from combining the results based on the number of antennas and/or processing elements currently in use.

主权项

1. An apparatus, comprising:
a plurality of antennas; a plurality of processing elements coupled to the plurality of antennas and configured to perform processing for received wireless communications via the plurality of antennas; one or more interconnects configured to couple ones of the plurality of processing elements with other ones of the plurality of processing elements; wherein the apparatus is configured to combine signals received by multiple antennas of the plurality of antennas; wherein, for at least a subset of the processing elements, each processing element is configured to operate on a different portion of the combined signal in parallel, wherein each portion includes signals from multiple antennas of the plurality of antennas; and wherein the apparatus is configured to operate in:
a first mode in which a first number of the plurality of processing elements process received wireless communications from a first number of the plurality of antennas; anda second mode in which a second number of the plurality of processing elements that is smaller than the first number of processing elements process received wireless communications from a second number of the plurality of antennas that is smaller than the first number of antennas.