Multi-user MIMO

Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) is a family of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) techniques in which a wireless communication system communicates with multiple users at the same time by using the spatial dimension of the radio channel. In a typical MU-MIMO system, a base station, access point, or other multi-antenna device transmits to, or receives from, several user devices over the same time-frequency resources.

MU-MIMO extends single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO), where one multi-antenna transmitter communicates with one multi-antenna receiver. It is closely related to space-division multiple access (SDMA), because users are separated by their spatial channel characteristics rather than only by time, frequency, or code resources.

MU-MIMO is used in cellular networks and wireless LAN systems, and is related to techniques such as massive MIMO, coordinated multipoint transmission and reception (CoMP), and cooperative MIMO.