Performance Analysis of Centralized and Distributed Massive MIMO for MTC

Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (mMIMO) is one of the essential technologies introduced by the Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless communication systems. However, although mMIMO provides many benefits for wireless communications, it cannot ensure uniform wireless coverage and suffers from inter-cell interference inherent to the traditional cellular network paradigm. Therefore, industry and academia are working on the evolution from conventional Centralized mMIMO (CmMIMO) to Distributed mMIMO (DmMIMO) architectures for the Sixth Generation (6G) of wireless networks. Under this new paradigm, several Access Points (APs) are distributed in the coverage area, and all jointly cooperate to serve the active devices. Aiming at Machine-Type Communication (MTC) use cases, we compare the performance of CmMIMO and different DmMIMO deployments in an indoor industrial scenario considering regular and alarm traffic patterns for MTC. Our simulation results show that DmMIMO's performance is often superior to CmMIMO. However, the traditional CmMIMO can outperform DmMIMO when the devices' channels are highly correlated.