  This paper surveys recent advances in the area of very large MIMO systems.
  With very large MIMO, we think of systems that use antenna arrays with an
order of magnitude more elements than in systems being built today, say a
hundred antennas or more. Very large MIMO entails an unprecedented number of
antennas simultaneously serving a much smaller number of terminals. The
disparity in number emerges as a desirable operating condition and a practical
one as well. The number of terminals that can be simultaneously served is
limited, not by the number of antennas, but rather by our inability to acquire
channel-state information for an unlimited number of terminals. Larger numbers
of terminals can always be accommodated by combining very large MIMO technology
with conventional time- and frequency-division multiplexing via OFDM. Very
large MIMO arrays is a new research field both in communication theory,
propagation, and electronics and represents a paradigm shift in the way of
thinking both with regards to theory, systems and implementation. The ultimate
vision of very large MIMO systems is that the antenna array would consist of
small active antenna units, plugged into an (optical) fieldbus.
