Spatial null creation using massive MIMO (M-MIMO)

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9300501-B2
Application number	US-201314137222-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Dec 20, 2013
Priority date	Apr 12, 2013
Publication date	Mar 29, 2016
Grant date	Mar 29, 2016

Abstract

In a base station having a Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (M-MIMO) antenna array, the availability of the M-MIMO antenna array is exploited to manage the interference caused by the base station to neighboring cells. In one embodiment, the large number of antenna elements of the M-MIMO antenna array are used to create precise transmit and/or receive spatial nulls at specific User Equipments (UEs) being served by a neighboring cell and/or in select areas of the neighboring cell. Depending on whether the spatial null is partial or full, transmissions by the base station may have reduced or even zero receive power within the neighboring cell.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A base station, comprising:
a Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (M-MIMO) antenna array comprising a plurality of antenna elements;
a switching module coupled to the M-MIMO antenna array; and
a processor, coupled to the switching module, configured to:
determine an estimate of a channel from the base station to a user equipment served by a neighboring base station;
determine, based at least in part on the estimate, a transmit precoder matrix;
ap…

Assignees

• Broadcom Corp

Inventors

• Jindal Nihar

Classifications

• H04W72/21

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04B7/0413

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04B7/0617

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04L25/03898 Primary

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04B7/0456 Primary

  Electricity · mapped topic