Massive MIMO is a new technique for wireless communications that claims to
offer very high system throughput and energy efficiency in multi-user
scenarios. The cost is to add a very large number of antennas at the base
station. Theoretical research has probed these benefits, but very few
measurements have showed the potential of Massive MIMO in practice. We
investigate the properties of measured Massive MIMO channels in a large indoor
venue. We describe a measurement campaign using 3 arrays having different shape
and aperture, with 64 antennas and 8 users with 2 antennas each. We focus on
the impact of the array aperture which is the main limiting factor in the
degrees of freedom available in the multiple antenna channel. We find that
performance is improved as the aperture increases, with an impact mostly
visible in crowded scenarios where the users are closely spaced. We also test
MIMO capability within a same user device with user proximity effect. We see a
good channel resolvability with confirmation of the strong effect of the user
hand grip. At last, we highlight that propagation conditions where
line-of-sight is dominant can be favorable