One of the key features of next generation wireless communication systems
will be the use of frequencies in the range 10-100GHz (aka mmWave band) in
densely populated indoor and outdoor scenarios. Due to the reduced wavelength,
antenna arrays with a large number of antennas can be packed in very small
volumes, making thus it possible to consider, at least in principle,
communication links wherein not only the base-station, but also the user
device, are equipped with very large antenna arrays. We denote this
configuration as a "doubly-massive" MIMO wireless link. This paper introduces
the concept of doubly massive MIMO systems at mmWave, showing that at mmWave
the fundamentals of the massive MIMO regime are completely different from what
happens at conventional sub-6 GHz cellular frequencies. It is shown for
instance that the multiplexing capabilities of the channel and its rank are no
longer ruled by the number of transmit and receive antennas, but rather by the
number of scattering clusters in the surrounding environment. The implications
of the doubly massive MIMO regime on the transceiver processing, on the system
energy efficiency and on the system throughput are also discussed.Comment: Accepted for presentation at 2016 IEEE GLOBECOM, Washington (DC),
USA, December 201