I think next generation is about MIMO antennas. What are your views on that? If this is the solution than how to implement on small devices like handsets? It seems challenging.
This might be one of those counter-intuitive things. While nothing has been set in stone about 5G cellular yet, it's a good bet that "massive MIMO" will play an important role. So contrary to what one might think, with massive MIMO, the base station antenna becomes a multi-element array, let's say "approaching infinity," while the user terminal antennas are simple antennas, like SISO.
Frequencies in the multiple 10s of GHz imply that relatively small antennas can achieve good gain. And the heavy lifting is left to the base station.
This link addresses some massive MIMO antenna considerations and array designs:
http://www.e-fermat.org/files/multimedias/Gao-MUL-EuCAP15-2016-Vol17-Sep._Oct.-002%20Massive%20MIMO%20Antenna%20Array%20Design......pdf
This paper investigates how many antenna elements a base station needs, as a function of the user terminals in a cell, degrees of freedom of the massive MIMO design, and SNR. And the user terminals have simple single-element antennas.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.1709.pdf
Definitely, massive MIMO thing is good for base station side. The array size also can be large, we have lots of space on base stations. But, to implement MIMO technology efficiently both Tx and Rx should have MIMO antennas
Instead of going for SISO in handsets or other portable devices I think MIMO is better choice. Interesting thing is to implement MIMO in constrained physical space in that case.
Sure, there will probably be handsets with multiple antennas also in massive MIMO implementations. But since the handset antennas are likely to have rather correlated channels, the primary purpose of these antennas might be antenna combining; sending one data stream with an array gain.
I went to an IET 5g conference where they suggested 1ghz speeds , mimo, and ns link times to minimise jitter and packet loss. So there will definitely be tiny mimo antennas, however they also said 5g will make a lot of use of wifi links too. I don't think 5g will necessarily be a new tech jump it's more use of merging current tech to make them work better together.
Higher order MIMO along with millimeter wave (8x8 for LTE-A).
U can find the same on Microwave Journal.
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