Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (mMIMO) is one of the essential technologies introduced by the Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless communication systems. However, although mMIMO provides many benefits for wireless communications, it cannot ensure uniform wireless coverage and suffers from inter-cell interference inherent to the traditional cellular network paradigm. Therefore, industry and academia are working on the evolution from conventional Centralized mMIMO (CmMIMO) to Distributed mMIMO (DmMIMO) architectures for the Sixth Generation (6G) of wireless networks. Under this new paradigm, several Access Points (APs) are distributed in the coverage area, and all jointly cooperate to serve the active devices. Aiming at Machine-Type Communication (MTC) use cases, we compare the performance of CmMIMO and different DmMIMO deployments in an indoor industrial scenario considering regular and alarm traffic patterns for MTC. Our simulation results show that DmMIMO's performance is often superior to CmMIMO. However, the traditional CmMIMO can outperform DmMIMO when the devices' channels are highly correlated.

翻译：大规模多输入多输出（mMIMO）是第五代（5G）无线通信系统引入的关键技术之一。然而，尽管mMIMO为无线通信带来了诸多优势，但它无法确保均匀的无线覆盖，且易受传统蜂窝网络范式固有的小区间干扰影响。因此，工业界和学术界正致力于从传统集中式mMIMO（CmMIMO）向第六代（6G）无线网络的分布式mMIMO（DmMIMO）架构演进。在这一新范式下，多个接入点（AP）分布于覆盖区域内，并协同合作为活跃设备提供服务。针对机器类通信（MTC）的应用场景，我们在室内工业环境中比较了CmMIMO与不同DmMIMO部署方案的性能，考虑了MTC的常规流量和告警流量模式。仿真结果表明，DmMIMO的性能通常优于CmMIMO。然而，当设备信道高度相关时，传统CmMIMO的性能可能超越DmMIMO。