Blocking probability of massive MIMO: What is the capacity of a massive MIMO IoT system?

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a methodology to evaluate the capacity of a Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) supported Internet of Things (IoT) system in which a large number of low cost low power IoT devices transmit and receive sporadic data. Numerous IoT devices are supported by a single cell Massive MIMO base station (BS) with maximum-ratio (MR) processing. Orthogonal reference signals (RSs) or pilots are assigned randomly to all the IoT devices for channel estimation purpose. The number of simultaneously active IoT devices follows Poisson distribution. Due to the tremendous number of IoT devices, orthogonal RSs are heavily reused, which severely degrades the receiver signal quality. One of the most important performance criteria for this kind of system is the blocking probability which shows the percentage of the outage IoT devices, and how we maintain the low blocking probability while supporting all the IoT devices simultaneously is particularly important. Due to RS reuse, we can divide IoT devices into two groups based on their interference levels. We provide detailed theoretical analyses, and show that the blocking primarily happens to the group with higher interference level. Increasing the number of service antennas and/or reducing the number of IoT devices can help to improve the performance of the blocking probability, however there is a regime in which the parameter adjustment helps little to improve the performance. Based on these factors, we provide a useful algorithm to improve the performance of blocking probability. A number of simulation results are also provided to validate the theoretical analysis.