From Antenna Abundance to Antenna Intelligence: Enabling Scalable 6G MIMO

Join us for the second session of the exciting webinar series on “New Frontiers in Signal Processing in 6G Wireless Networks”, a collaboration between IEEE Signal Processing, IEEE Communications Society chapters in Ottawa, and IEEE ComSoC Young Professionals. Register now and stay tuned for updates on upcoming speakers and topics! Speaker(s): Prof. Emil Bjornson Agenda: Massive MIMO is a cornerstone of 5G cellular networks, unlocking unprecedented capacity through spatial multiplexing. Unfortunately, this performance enhancement comes at the cost of using many hardware components. The Massive MIMO philosophy is the abundance of service antennas, e.g., 64 base station antennas to send 8 data layers, when 8 antennas would theoretically suffice. This overprovisioning isn’t accidental; it ensures favorable propagation conditions so that most user channels are compatible for multiplexing, regardless of the channel environment. But as we move toward 6G, this approach becomes unsustainable since the number of antennas must grow much quicker than the network capacity. In this seminar, we’ll explore a bold shift in multi-user MIMO design: achieving high capacity with fewer antennas per data layer. The key lies in smarter, site-specific antenna architectures. By moving beyond conventional half-wavelength-spaced uniform arrays, we can unlock the potential gains of sparse arrays, non-uniform geometries, transmissive intelligent metasurfaces, and even physically movable elements. These techniques promise a new era of scalable MIMO technology—tailored for real-world deployments and intelligently optimized for 6G spatial multiplexing without requiring an abundance of antennas. Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/503863