Field Trials on Spectral Efficiency Improvement in Massive MIMO Systems

Three 5G enabling technologies, i.e, sparse code multiple access (SCMA), Polar codes and filtered OFDM (f-OFDM), are implemented into a massive MIMO system in the field trial conducted by HUAWEI and NTT DOCOMO to investigate their impacts on the system spectral efficiency. Taking massive MIMO with OFDMA and Turbo codes as the baseline, we observe about 30% downlink spectral efficiency improvement in the trial. Results from test field are summarized and analyzed in this paper, which verified that SCMA, Polar codes and f- OFDM are also feasible for massive MIMO systems in terms of spectral efficiency improvement.