A Real-Time Experimentation Platform for sub-6 GHz and Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems

The performance of wireless communication systems is evolving rapidly, making it difficult to build experimentation platforms that meet the hardware requirements of new standards. The bandwidth of current systems ranges from 160 MHz for IEEE 802.11ac/ax to 2 GHz for Millimeter-Wave (mm-wave) IEEE 802.11ad/ay, and they support up to 8 spatial MIMO streams. Mobile 5G and beyond systems have a similarly diverse set of requirements.

To address this, we propose a highly configurable wireless plat- form that meets such requirements and is both affordable and scal- able. It is implemented on a single state-of-the-art FPGA board that can be configured from 4x4 mm-wave MIMO with 2 GHz channels to 8x8 MIMO with 160 MHz channels in sub-6 GHz bands. In ad- dition, multi-band operation will play an important role in future wireless networks and our platform supports mixed configurations with simultaneous use of mm-wave and sub-6 GHz. Finally, the platform supports real-time operation, e.g., for closed-loop MIMO beam training with low-latency, by implementing suitable hard- ware/software accelerators. We demonstrate the platform’s perfor- mance in a wide range of experiments. The platform is provided as open-source to build a community to use and extend it.