Origin of the “Massive MIMO” Name

“A dear child has many names” is a Swedish saying and it certainly applies to Massive MIMO. It is commonly claimed that the Massive MIMO concept originates from the seminal paper “Noncooperative Cellular Wireless with Unlimited Numbers of Base Station Antennas” by Thomas Marzetta, published in 2010. This is basically correct, except for the fact that the paper only talks about “Multi-user MIMO systems with very large antenna arrays“. Marzetta then published several papers using the large‐scale antenna systems (LSAS) terminology, before switching to calling it Massive MIMO in more recent years. Over the years, various papers have also called it “very large multiuser MIMO” and “large-scale MIMO“. Nowadays, Massive MIMO is used by almost everyone in the research community, and even by marketing people.

If you search at IEEEXplore, the origin of the name remains puzzling. The earliest papers are “Massive MIMO: How many antennas do we need?” by Hoydis/ten Brink/Debbah and “Achieving Large Spectral Efficiency with TDD and Not-so-Many Base-Station Antennas” by Huh/Giuseppe Caire/Papadopoulos/Ramprashad, both from 2011. However, these papers are referring to Marzetta’s seminal paper, which doesn’t call it “Massive MIMO”.

If you instead read the news reports by ZDNet and Silicon from the 2010 Bell Labs Open Days in Paris, the origin of “Massive MIMO” becomes clearer. Marzetta presented his concept and reportedly said that “We haven’t been able to come up with a catchy name”, but told ZDNet that “massive MIMO” and “large-scale MIMO” were two candidates. To the Massive MIMO blog, Marzetta now explains why he initially abandoned these potential names, in favor for LSAS:

When I explained the concept to the Bell Labs Director of Research, he commented that it didn’t sound at all like MIMO to him. He recommended strongly that I think of a name that didn’t contain the acronym “MIMO”, hence, LSAS. Eventually (after everyone else called it Massive MIMO) I abandoned “LSAS” and started to call it “Massive MIMO”.

In conclusion, the Massive MIMO name came originally from Marzetta, who used it when first describing the concept to the public, but the name was popularized by other researchers.

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