Software Defined Radio Prototyping for MU-MIMO Beamspace Channel

Abstract

Wireless systems with multiple antennas known as Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) has been shown to tremendously improve the system capacity and reliability compared to the single-antenna systems Generally the number of parallel data streams that a MIMO system can support is limited by the number of transmit or receive antennas whichever is less As the number of users increases more antennas at the Base Station (BS) is required to ful- fill the user demands leading to increased capital cost to the operators An alternative is to select a subset of users to serve simultaneously based on the Channel State Information (CSI) In this context the beamspace provides the required spatial information for user se- lection While the beamspace theory is well known its practical application to addressing the user selection problem has not been explored In this thesis a versatile prototype based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) is developed to study the user selection problem based on the beamspace MIMO channel The implemented prototype operates at the sub-6 GHz band with the capability to support a wide range of antenna configurations and user-defined signals Besides the over-the-air synchronization is achieved by considering two types of frame structures A filed measurement campaign is conducted in an indoor environment and the measurement results confirm the superiority of the beamspace MIMO channel over the antenna space MIMO channel in identifying an appropriate subset of spatially distributed users

Date of Award	2017 Jun 28
Original language	English
Supervisor	Kuang-Hao Liu (Supervisor)