We propose massive MIMO unlicensed (mMIMO-U) as a high-capacity solution forfuture indoor wireless networks operating in the unlicensed spectrum. Buildingupon massive MIMO (mMIMO), mMIMO-U incorporates additional key features, suchas the capability of placing accurate radiation nulls towards coexisting nodesduring the channel access and data transmission phases. We demonstrate thespectrum reuse and data rate improvements attained by mMIMO-U by comparingthree practical deployments: single-antenna Wi-Fi, where an indoor operatordeploys three single-antenna Wi-Fi access points (APs), and two other scenarioswhere the central AP is replaced by either a mMIMO AP or the proposed mMIMO-UAP. We show that upgrading the central AP with mMIMO-U provides increasedchannel access opportunities for all of them. Moreover, mMIMO-U achievesfour-fold and seven-fold gains in median throughput when compared totraditional mMIMO and single-antenna setups, respectively.
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