Massive MIMO for Underwater Industrial Internet of Things Networks

Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems which include a large number of service antennas have received a great deal of attention as a means to improve both spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) of wireless communication systems. In this article, we study the feasibility of using Massive MIMO to support a vast amount of underwater Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices. By using a large number of antennas as compensation entities for the low bandwidth in the underwater channel, we show that underwater Massive MIMO can simultaneously support a massive amount of underwater IIoT devices. Electromagnetic radio frequency (RF) and acoustic waves are used to present the performance with respect to SE, throughput (TP) per user equipment (UE), and coverage. Additionally, we show that both Massive MIMO with RF and acoustic waves have the same closed-form upper bounds which can be used as an important design tool of underwater IIoT networks. Numerical results verify the theoretical analysis.