We consider cellular base stations (BSs) equipped with a large number of
antennas and operating in the unlicensed band. We denote such system as massive
MIMO unlicensed (mMIMO-U). We design the key procedures required to guarantee
coexistence between a cellular BS and nearby Wi-Fi devices. These include:
neighboring Wi-Fi channel covariance estimation, allocation of spatial degrees
of freedom for interference suppression, and enhanced channel sensing and data
transmission phases. We evaluate the performance of the so-designed mMIMO-U,
showing that it allows simultaneous cellular and Wi-Fi transmissions by keeping
their mutual interference below the regulatory threshold. The same is not true
for conventional listen-before-talk (LBT) operations. As a result, mMIMO-U
boosts the aggregate cellular-plus-Wi-Fi data rate in the unlicensed band with
respect to conventional LBT, exhibiting increasing gains as the number of BS
antennas grows.Comment: To appear in Proc. IEEE ICC 201