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What's the difference between SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO?
- SU - Single User
- MU - Multiple Users
- MIMO - Multiple-Input Multiple-Output
Wireless engineers often encounter the terms SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO when designing or selecting Wi-Fi and cellular solutions. SU-MIMO stands for Single-User Multiple Input Multiple Output, while MU-MIMO means Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output. Both techniques use multiple antennas and spatial streams to boost performance, but they differ in how many devices they serve at once and how they impact network behavior.
SU-MIMO (Single-User MIMO) is the traditional form of MIMO in which a transmitter (such as a Wi-Fi access point or cellular base station) uses multiple antennas to communicate with one device at a time. The device on the other end may also have multiple antennas so that multiple data streams can be sent in parallel to that single receiver, increasing the data rate to that one client.
MU-MIMO (Multi-User MIMO) expands on MIMO by enabling the transmitter to send independent data streams to multiple devices at the same time. In a MU-MIMO system, an AP or base station with N antennas can communicate with several clients concurrently, as long as the total number of spatial streams doesn’t exceed N. Each client could receive one or more streams, but commonly in Wi-Fi each MU-MIMO client gets one spatial stream for simplicity (especially if clients are single-antenna).