Analysis of Different Antenna Array Configurations in Massive MIMO Cellular System for Line of Sight

This paper investigates the effect of antenna array configurations on propagation environment in massive-multiple-input multiple-output (M-MIMO) cellular system with line of sight (LoS) channels. In this study, uniform linear array (ULA) for two-dimensional (2D) and uniform planar array (UPA) for three-dimensional (3D) antenna configurations using multi-cell minimum mean squared error (M-MMSE) detection technique are considered for the uplink scenario. For serving user equipments (UEs) particularly in the azimuth domain, the simulation results shows that the system deploying horizontal uniform linear array (HULA) outperforms in terms of spectrum efficiency (SE) among considered array configurations with the same number of antennas. It is observed that ULA favors the propagation to UEs distributed in the respective domain of 2D plane, and UPA performs better for 3D plane to capture the entire propagation environment than linear ones due to its capability of receiving incident waves from both elevation and azimuth domains.